When it comes to capturing the sheen on the surface, few are better placed than Baz Luhrmann. No matter the scale, from his (relatively) lo-fi debut Strictly Ballroom to the epic excess of Australia, Luhrmann paints with the broadest of strokes. Big sets, brash colours and hearts on sleeves are the order of the day. In his adaptation of The Great Gatsby, the brashest of colours is the green light, eternally flickering at the end of Buchanan’s dock on the opposite side of Manhassett Bay from the mansion of Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). It’s an important symbol of Gatsby’s hopes in the novel, but Luhrmann shines the light in our faces at every opportunity. Like so many of the symbols brought into Luhrmann and Craig Pearce’s screenplay, it goes from suggestive emblem to towering obviousness long before the end.

Our guide into Gatsby’s world is Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire). Carraway is the novel’s narrator and a relative voice of sanity in the world of West Egg, Long Island, home to the nouveau riche of New York’s boom before the bust. However, not content with a ready-made narrator, Luhrmann goes one step further and has Carraway tell the film in flashback from a sanitarium. Having Carraway committed is an unnecessary change from the book, even if it is about the most significant change made to the original plot. Carraway recounts the summer of 1922, and the hedonistic parties thrown at the Gatsby mansion in West Egg. Newly moved into a cottage next door to Gatsby, Carraway visits with his cousin Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) and her polo-playing husband Tom (Joel Edgerton). Carraway luxuriates in the wealth of the West and East Egg sets with a grin from ear to ear. Part of the problem with Carraway is that Tobey Maguire is simply too chipper for this everyman. Yes, everything’s shiny and bright, but if this Carraway represented the everyman in the audience, he’d have a headache from the 3D.

"You're my agent, you have to get me out of this. He wants to film in 3D, for chrissakes!"

Carraway is over the moon when Gatsby personally invites him to his latest party. Bathed in CG moonlight and fireworks, Gatsby’s soirée looks like the world’s classiest themed nightclub. Champagne flows and pool waters glow as Carraway gets close to Daisy’s pal Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki). Then, at the perfect moment, as the catherine wheels rise to a crescendo, we meet Gatsby. Bathed in the sparks falling from the sky, DiCaprio is perfect casting; yes, he’s dashing and charming, but he’s also a fine actor, and is about the only person who remembers Gatsby is tragic, finding a desperate heart beneath the pressed tuxedo. He connives to get Carraway to bring he and his former lover Daisy together, despite her being married and they not having seen each other in five years. Bearing his previous films in mind, you can see what drew Luhrmann to this story.

Luhrmann’s got the ‘doomed romance’ genre covered; Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge! are both hypnotically OTT love affairs. However, when his aerial swooshing around Long Island and Gatsby’s parties recalls the latter film (and fitted it better the first time), it’s clear Luhrmann can’t leave the genre behind. The romance between Gatsby and Daisy get most of the plot’s attention, with Gatsby’s delusions about his future with her getting slotted into the last act. The Great Gatsby is a triumph of style over substance, as 3D skyscrapers and flashy cars dominate the screen. Meanwhile, the green light and the eyes of TJ Eckleburg sashay in frequently as Luhrmann ticks the boxes of items the novel’s devotees would demand to see. Motifs and themes are tickled in an almost off-hand fashion; metaphors become more literal to keep the pace brisk. The lack of subtlety extends to the soundtrack. Why have the period beats of Cole Porter when the likes of Fergie, Jay-Z and Lana Del Rey can serenade us into incoherence?!

DiCaprio does a lot of heavy lifting in his lead role, as his supports are a mixed bunch at best. Debicki brings some effervescence to the underwritten Jordan, whilst the eclectically-cast Amitabh Bachchan sports a mean pinstripe as Gatsby’s business partner Wolfsheim. Maguire is too chirpy for Carraway, whose relationship with Gatsby is at least three furtive glances beyond ‘platonic’. Mulligan looks the part, but she’s too perky to bring out the necessary coolness in Daisy. Had she and Debicki switched roles, this review could have gone up an extra half-star. Edgerton’s a boo-hiss baddy, whilst Isla Fisher is forgettable as Myrtle Wilson, the working-class girl caught up in the covert affairs of the monied gentry (Jason Clarke as her husband George is arguably the most miscast role of the lot).

Occasionally, the text of the novel rolls across the screen as Luhrmann reminds us he’s actually read the book. There is no doubt about that; The Great Gatsby is slavish to the plot to the point of breathlessness. The book has a lot going on (thematically and narratively), perhaps more that a feature film can capture. Like another great novel of disillusioned wealth, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, The Great Gatsby would probably work better as a mini-series. Like Gatsby reaching for the green light, we’re reaching out for a definitive Great Gatsby. Robert Redford couldn’t do it; DiCaprio has tried, but his cohorts have undermined him. Time for someone else (and perhaps HBO or Netflix) to take up the green-tinged baton.

Click here to view the embedded video.

*POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD*

A – Adaptations

The 2013 version of The Great Gatsby is the latest in a number of adaptations of the 1925 novel. Of the other adaptations, the most notable are the 1949 version (with Alan Ladd as Gatsby), and the 1974 version (with Robert Redford in the lead role). Neither version is considered a classic. In fact, despite co-starring Bruce Dern and Mia Farrow and boasting a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola, the 1974 adaptation is nothing short of crap.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If nothing else it proves it’s tough to do justice to a classic novel on film.

B – Baz Luhrmann

The never-knowingly understated Baz Luhrmann is the man in charge of the latest attempt to bring Fitzgerald’s tome to the big screen.  His previous films include William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (a brash and fun take on the Bard), Moulin Rouge! (Cheesily, wickedly enjoyable neo-musical) and Australia (pretty, but bloated). His films are  inconsistent in quality, but you’ll never be bored. They’re all just too handsome and energetic to be ignored.

Click here to view the embedded video.

C – Carraway, Nick

Our way in to The Great Gatsby is via our narrator, Nick Carraway (played in the new film by Tobey Maguire). Carraway is a bond salesman newly arrived in the town of West Egg. He is fascinated by the parties and activities of his new neighbour, one Jay Gatsby. Generally optimistic, Carraway is something of a blank slate (making Tobey Maguire pitch-perfect casting. Ooh, burn!) Mind you, that optimism starts to ebb as time goes on…

D – Daisy Buchanan

“And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool”

Daisy Buchanan (Carey Mulligan) is married to Tom, second cousin to Carraway and former lover and object of affection for Gatsby. Honestly, she’s something of a dim flake (making Carey Mulligan pitch-perf… forget it, too easy.), with many critics suggesting Gatsby’s pursuit of her is more about the monied, privileged life she represents than about Daisy herself. Remember, no matter what Luhrmann might try to tell you otherwise, this isn’t a love story!

E – Egg (West and East)

Manhasset Bay, circa 1917

The Great Gatsby is set in the fictional Long Island town of West Egg, with East Egg across the bay. In reality, West Egg and East Egg are the hamlets of Great Neck and Sands Point, villages on peninsulas on the opposite sides of Manhasset Bay.

The geography is symbolic. Most of the action takes place in West Egg, which represents ‘new money’. East Egg represents the old aristocracy. West Egg represents traditional values, with the East linked to New York’s moral decay. Of the cast of characters, only Gatsby and Carraway, the optimists of the piece, reside in West Egg.

(Note to self: must buy eggs.)

F – Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key (F. Scott) Fitzgerald (1896 – 1940) is widely considered one of the finest American writers of the 20th century, despite finishing just four novels in his lifetime. He made most of his income through short-story writing but his novels, including The Great Gatsby, remain his most enduring works. Gatsby is believed to be inspired by the new-money neighbours the Fitzgeralds encountered when they moved to Great Neck, New York in 1922.

G – Green Light

One of the most discussed symbols in The Great Gatsby is a green light at the end of the dock by the Buchanan’s house on the opposite side of the bay from Gatsby’s mansion. It symbolizes Gatsby’s hope to rekindle his romance with Daisy, and to recapture the position and happiness he enjoyed before going to fight in World War I. It represents hope that, by the end of the novel, will have soured into pessimism.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You’ll never be so invested in the resonance of a lighting fixture as when reading Gatsby.

H – Hippity-Hop

The soundtrack to Gatsby 2K13 boasts some genuine ‘20s sounds (Cole Porter, Fats Waller) sat next to the likes of Lana Del Ray, Jay-Z and Emeli Sandé. It might help convey the lavish lifestyle Gatsby enjoys, but what might Fitzgerald have made of will.i.am or Florence and the Machine?

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Luhrmann, you are an odd fellow, but we’ll wait and see how you worked those beats into this 1920s tale.

I – Infidelity

For a book as celebrated as The Great Gatsby, it has more soap opera-esque cheating in it than a week’s worth of Coronation Street. Gatsby attempts to woo Daisy away from Tom, who in turn is cheating on Daisy with a married woman (See M for ‘Myrtle’). Given that the noob Carraway is the only one who manages anything approaching a steady relationship (See J for ‘Jordan’), the lead character’s infidelities lead back to the novel’s themes of hopelessness amongst the monied classes (See G for ‘Green Light’).

J – Jordan Baker

Played by Elizabeth Debicki in Luhrmann’s version, Jordan Baker is a socialite friend of Daisy Buchanan. She is introduced to Carraway soon after his arrival in West Egg, and they conduct a relationship throughout most of the novel. We learn certain tidbits of information from Jordan (Tom’s affair, amongst other things), but she also has a penchant for mistruths. Rumour has it her golf handicap isn’t as impressive as she claims. Ooh, the scamp!

K – Klipspringer

Part of The Great Gatsby’s atmosphere comes from the little side characters that flit in and out of the narrative. They serve little narrative function, but they’re memorable nonetheless. Such figures include Owl Eyes, an eccentric with an abiding interest in Gatsby, and Klipspringer, a party guest who mooches of Gatsby without particularly liking him. They sum up the people with whom Gatsby associates: oddballs and phonies.

L – Leonardo Di Caprio

Anyone who’s read The Great Gatsby will know that Leo is ideal casting for the lead role. Gatsby is handsome and leads a lavish lifestyle, but very few know anything about him. DiCaprio has played charming outsiders before (The Quick and the Dead, Titanic, Catch Me If You Can) so he’s well placed to bring the elusive yet fascinating Gatsby to life.

M – Myrtle Wilson

Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher) is the wild card in the whole Gatsby affair. She lives a drab life with her husband George in the Valley of Ashes (See ‘V’). Myrtle is the secret lover of Tom Buchanan. She sees the affair as a chance to escape her rut, but he’s just interested in the physical side of it. As is the wont of such characters, Myrtle is the fuse for tragedy and revelations in the final act.

N – New York

“There’s something very sensuous about it – overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”

In Fitzgerald’s tome, New York is an intoxicating hub with the potential to corrupt with parties, shows and bars. In other words, it’s a typical portrayal of New York. It’s there that Gatsby meets with associates for his shadier business dealings (See ‘W’ for Wolfsheim), and Tom Buchanan keeps an apartment there to conduct his affair (See ‘M’ for Myrtle).

O – Opticians

Glimpsed briefly in the trailer, a billboard for an optician named T.J. Eckleberg hangs just above the Valley of Ashes. The billboard depicts a pair of bespectacled eyes. Towards the end of the novel the billboard takes on different resonances for different characters; they are often interpreted as the eyes of God looking down in judgement at the chaos of these characters’ lives.

Or it might just be an interesting piece of set decoration. You decide!

©2012 thesimplyLexi and used under a Creative Commons licence

P – Parties

“The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.”

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Jay Gatsby is renowned throughout New York and Long Island for his lavish Saturday night parties at his mansion on West Egg. His wealth and partes make up the crux of his plan to prove to Daisy he’s worthy of her. Essentially, he’s having a house party to show off to the girl he fancies. JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE.

Q – Quixotic

When it’s not being tragic or bordering on romantic, The Great Gatsby wallows in the opulence of the 1920s upper class. Flapper girls and long chains of beads abound, boyish hairdos are in vogue and the suits are pin-striped and smooth as silk. To quote Carraway in the movie’s trailer, “The buildings were higher. The parties were bigger. The morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper. The restlessness approached hysteria.”

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R – Reception

It’s regarded as a classic now, but Gatsby was not as successful as Fitzgerald had hoped. It sold less than his two previous novels, and reviews were mixed. Fitzgerald would not live to see Gatsby’s revival. Indeed, his obituary in the New York Times in December 1940 said, “The promise of his brilliant career was never fulfilled.” Hindsight is a wonderful thing, innit?

As for the new film, you can read our verdict on 2013’s The Great Gatsby later this week!

S – Self-delusion

‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’

The ultimate tragedy of The Great Gatsby is Jay Gatsby’s self-delusion. He’s spent years making money with the sole intent of proving himself worthy of a now-married former lover. The elegance and energy with which Gatsby surrounds himself masks his failure to either get what he wants or to achieve closure.

And you thought classic literature was all fun and games!

T – Trimalchio

Fitzgerald toyed with a number of possible titles for his book before settling on The Great Gatsby. One proposed title was Trimalchio In West Egg. It’s unlikely the book would have sold if an explanatory note was needed underneath the title.

Oh, alright. Trimalchio is a character in Petronius’ Satyricon who, like Gatsby, is a newcomer to a higher socio-economic status. Happy now?

U – Unsympathetic

Fitzgerald attributed the relative failure of The Great Gatsby to a dearth of sympathetic characters. He particularly regretted omitting any sympathetic female characters, since women were the key demographic for novels at the time. Is that altogether fair? Some characters are boo-hiss hateable, but we can’t let Gatsby’s wealth overshadow his true situation. He’s surrounded by people, yet feels desperately alone; the one woman he wants, he can’t have (at least not without paying the consequences)

The Beatles were right: I Am The Walrus Money can’t buy me love.

V – Valley of Ashes

Between New York and West Egg lies the Valley of Ashes, a stretch of land blackened by the dumping of industrial ashes. It’s also the district in which George and Myrtle Wilson live. The lower classes get covered in the waste of industry and wealth. Gatsby is not an overtly political book, but the relevance of its themes, including class conflict, has not dimmed.

W – Wolfsheim, Meyer

Meyer Wolfsheim (played by Amitabh Bachchan in Luhrmann’s adaptation) is a Jewish gangster and associate of Gatsby. He’s clearly modelled on real gangster Arnold Rothstein; Wolfsheim claims to have rigged the 1919 World Series baseball, a true crime in which Rothstein was implicated. Wolfsheim is a bootlegger, and offers hints that Gatsby’s wealth may have been accumulated by less than legal means.

X – (Alleged) Xenophobia

A charge that has been levelled at The Great Gatsby over the years is that it’s racist. Though he describes himself as tolerant, Carraway’s description of the Jewish Wolfsheim is riddled with contempt, and Tom Buchanan reveals some ideals that many would describe as the viewpoint of a white supremacist. However, there’s no evidence Fitzgerald himself was a racist; the less enlightened  attitudes of the 1920s are reflected in the characters. Their hypocrisy is just another level of the monied delusion in which these characters operate.

Y – Yale

In the novel, both Carraway and Buchanan are graduates of Yale university; in fact, they were classmates. His education (amongst other things) mean Carraway is both privileged in his access to the monied classes and fearful of those who didn’t have the same privileges. (See ‘X’ for Xenophobia).

Z – Zelda

Zelda Fitzgerald (née Sayre) was a Southern socialite and novelist, who  married Fitzgerald in 1920. Events from Zelda’s life provided her husband with material for some of his characters. Their turbulent relationship fuelled public fascination, but it as ultimately defined by tragedy. Diagnosed as bipolar in 1930, Zelda spent significant periods in sanatoriums from 1930 until her death in 1948. Fitzgerald died in 1940, having last seen Zelda some 18 months previously. Zelda died in a hospital fire in 1948.

The dedications on The Great Gatsby read simply

Once again to Zelda

To this day, the Fitzgeralds’ simple tombstone bears the last line of The Great Gatsby as an inscription:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Fitzgeralds ©2009 Confetta and used under a Creative Commons licence

Nowhere is the phenomenon more immediately evident than on Twitter, where it usually takes no more than 140 characters to reveal just who is that very special kind of arsehole.

The success of the documentary, therefore, will largely depend on the viewer’s interpretation of Baker – a legendary drummer who has played in a series of acclaimed bands including Cream and Blind Faith. Its makers are clearly trying to portray him as a lovable misanthrope, a grouch with a heart beneath his intimidating and curmudgeonly veneer, as they often avoid pressing him on the more disreputable moments in his personal life. That said though, the less hospitable aspects of his character are established immediately – the film opens with a shot of Baker violently attacking director Jay Bulger, hitting him with a metal cane in the process.

The action then reverts back in time and relives Baker’s childhood onwards. It explains how he was born in World War II London in 1939, and how his father – a soldier – died tragically when Baker was only four. A social misfit like so many musicians, he found solace in his one true passion – drumming. The challenge of conveying this early period is consequently well handled. Video footage is inevitably absent, but some simple though effective and often witty animations provide the musician’s memories with a necessary visual context.

The film also illustrates how Baker has always been as temperamental and prone to violent outbursts as he appears to be in the present day. There is one revealing story about him launching an onstage attack on a guitarist who had the supposed temerity of playing along during one of his drum solos, while interviewees recall how Eric Clapton was perpetually “terrified” of the drummer and his manic tendencies during their Cream days. Indeed, the relationship between Clapton and Baker is still an interesting one – the latter suggests he continues to have a deep bond with the former, while Clapton, when interviewed, provides an illuminating and contrasting view of someone who he rarely sees and remains deeply wary of.

There is no doubting that Baker is an interesting character, and one who genuinely can be described as a maverick. He is constantly on the move, living in LA, Nigeria and Italy at various points in his life. His immersion in African culture and his striking up of a strong friendship with the legendary musician Fela Kuti is one especially interesting development, though inevitably, as with effectively every other relationship in Baker’s life, it ends in acrimony. Kuti becomes peeved at his willingness to undermine the musician’s political beliefs by playing polo with the bourgeoisie – another habit he happens to acquire over the years.

Yet as intriguing, eccentric and unpredictable a person as Baker is, he fails what is often the true test of a great protagonist in a documentary, in which the viewer asks: would he/she be happy to have a pint with this person? Not only is Baker consistently aggressive, he also has serious issues with the opposite sex. He leaves his first wife to marry his daughter’s boyfriend’s 18-year-old sister, then becomes upset when she ditches him. He subsequently marries a young American graduate student, before soon growing bored and leaving her behind as he departs to Africa. He currently lives with a fourth African wife, who speaks one word during the entire film. In one of the many moments that’s in equal parts highly embarrassing and unintentionally funny, she pauses for a long time when asked if Baker is “a good stepfather,” before unconvincingly saying “yes”.

Even worse is Baker’s treatment of his son. He tells him he’ll never have the talent to match his own achievements as a drummer, openly informs him that he “doesn’t care” about him, and gives him cocaine when the-then 15-year-old protests that he’s too ill to play a gig. It’s therefore no wonder the two are no longer on speaking terms.

And unfortunately, the one anomalous glimpse of humanity Baker exhibits – in which he cries about the fact that has made friends with four well-respected drummers that he idolised as a child – is footage taken from another film. It highlights the fact that the questions in this documentary, for whatever reason, never seem to enable Baker to properly open up. Any attempts to ask deeper, non-music-related queries are invariably met with a terse “f**k off,” or something similarly uncooperative.

Of course, hardcore music nerds may revel in the rare footage of the many acclaimed Baker performances that it unearths. And these moments invariably highlight the depth of Baker’s talent, while the coterie of impressive musicians interviewed (including Carlos Santana and Metallica’s Lars Ulrich) also assure viewers of his remarkable musical prowess. Unfortunately however, the difficulty in feeling empathy for this 60s wildchild who never grew up will still be a considerable stumbling block for many cinema-goers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have a list an arm long of online coursework to do, assignments to submit and documents I have to gather by June. I am at a disadvantage because I have to sit a multi-subject teaching certification exam that covers such subjects as American history and social studies that I never covered in school not having gone to an American high school or college, so I have to study that too. My children still need to eat nutritious meals and need clean clothes to wear. They need help with their homework and to be brought to the various birthday parties and play dates they are invited to. The training in the summer is six weeks from 9 to 6.30 an hour and a half away from home. I will hardly see them at all in that time. The pool is to be relined and opened this week. Will I ever get to swim in it? George has been constructing a brand new little kitchen, weekend by weekend. At the moment I can’t foresee a time when I will actually get to cook in it. I have no idea what my schedule will look like in September. I just hope I can work out some kind of work/life balance that keeps everyone happy and home life running smoothly.

It seems that if I want the American dream to come true I’m going to have to spread myself very thinly. I am aware that other working mothers juggle this stuff all the time, it is obviously doable if a little overwhelming and I’m confident that I’ll somehow figure it all out but re-entering the rat race to this extent after eight years of being home with the kids is damn scary. This is what I wanted though, isn’t it? This is why I uprooted my family and transplanted them across the Atlantic Ocean. I’m going to do my best to make a go of it with my fingers kept tightly crossed that this is The Right Thing To Do and hey, with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work I may end up with a few more letters after my name and the resources to fund my children to earn a few when their time comes. It gives me confidence that my youngest child draws me cheering under a blue sky. I hope he still sees me like this next year.

The traditionally tried and tested but not always trusted methods

Thinking outside the box then.

Fake it til you make it

Sadly though, watching Bernardo Bertolucci’s latest, Me and You – an adaptation of a novel by Niccolo Ammaniti – it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that the Italian’s best days are behind him. It’s not that the director of such masterful works as The Conformist has made a terrible movie – he just seems to be treading awfully familiar territory. Me and You focuses on extremely similar ideas explored in Bertolucci’s previous films, with a level of sexual tension permeating most scenes in a manner similar to that of Stealing Beauty, The Dreamers (his most recent movie prior to this effort) and Last Tango in Paris.

It follows the (mis)fortunes of 14-year-old Lorenzo – almost a straight version of Harry Enfield’s Kevin the Teenager, so strong is his cynical, anti-social attitude. He treats his mother appallingly (at one point, he asks if she’d have sex with him if they were the last two people on Earth) and invariably shuts himself off from the world, preferring to lose himself in music or tend to his colony of ants that he strangely keeps as pets.

His mother, obviously eager for Lorenzo to eschew his loner tendencies, organises a ski trip that he is obliged to attend during the holidays. However, rather than complying with this scheme, in a true rebellious teenage manner, Lorenzo decides to bunk off the trip and instead, hide out in the basement of the mother’s flat. And for a while, he copes reasonably well with the solitude of his new lifestyle, but the situation is complicated amid the arrival of his half sister Olivia. It is quickly established that she is a heroin addict, with an uncanny knack for creating problematic situations, thereby leading to all sorts of trouble for Lorenzo.

One of the film’s strengths is that it enables us to remain interested in its less-than-lovable characters, despite their many faults. There is a mischievous, idiosyncratic charm that Lorenzo possesses, similar to Antoine Doinel in the 400 Blows, or several of the other French New Wave films that Bertolucci is obviously fond of.

Moreover, like his best works, Me and You has a distinctive, albeit modest, visual palette. Scenes are predominantly shot with little light, owing to both the characters’ naturally gloomy surroundings and Olivia’s preference for keeping the curtains closed, as a result of her perpetually tired, drug-addled state.

The relationship between the protagonists, played faultlessly by Tea Falco and Jacopo Olmo Antinori respectively, is problematic to say the least. There is a significant age gap between the two, not to mention the fact that they are half brother and sister. There are times when the sexual tension is so palpable that the film appears to be practically urging the two of them to get together, but this circumstance feels nowhere near as titillating as Bertolucci seems to think it is, especially with Olivia constantly vomiting and drugged up for most of the film.

Me and You thus plays like a subversive coming-of-age drama. There is a certain irony in the fact that Lorenzo’s mother appears to treat him impeccably and lavishes him with elaborate gifts including skiing gear, yet it is only when he is confronted by Olivia, who by contrast treats him terribly, that he responds with genuine warmth and emotional openness. Bertolucci therefore seems to suggest, somewhat provocatively, that spoilt teenagers could do with occasionally witnessing the darker sides of life such as drug addiction, and that such experiences have the potential to help them become less uptight, more so than any normal, fun ski trip ever could. Yet that point aside, while the movie is rarely boring, it seldom has anything insightful to say, and seems somewhat empty and deprived of depth.

At one stage in the film, Olivia explains to Lorenzo how being high causes you to feel nothing – a sensation (or lack thereof) that can incidentally also be prompted by aimless Italian art films.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yet McConaughey has yet to star in a classic that could come to define his career. The closest he’s come thus far is arguably his debut, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. His latest string of winning performances have all been in films that, entertaining and well-made as they may be, are far from their directors’ bests (Friedkin’s Killer Joe, Magic Mike for Steven Soderbergh, reuniting with Linklater on Bernie). Alas, Jeff Nichols’ Mud continues in that vein. It’s compelling viewing on its own terms, but a lot of its cred comes from its leading man. Credit where credit’s due, however, Mud benefits from the efforts of two leading men.

After the solitary paranoia of Michael Shannon’s bug-eyed turn in Take Shelter, Nichols widens his gaze to include two fascinating portraits of male isolation. Ellis (a terrifically steely-eyed Tye Sheridan) is a typical teenager, restlessly looking for adventure in the everyday. One day, he and his friend Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) borrow a motorboat and sneak down their local river, a little stream by the name of the Mississippi. This setting alone invokes a certain atmosphere, ripe with clammy air and the scent of whitewash from a Mark Twain novel. They head for an island down river where they discover a boat washed up into the trees from a flood years before. This is the point where Tom Sawyer becomes a little too obvious as an influence, with our own Tom and Huck Finn on the Mississippi. The film’s version of Injun Joe goes only by the monicker of Mud (McConaughey), a stranger who’s living in the boy’s boat when they discover it. With a past as murky as the waters surrounding the island, Ellis is fascinated by Mud, to the point that he agrees to help Mud out. Anyone on the run from the law needs all the help he can get.

As the latest chapter of the ‘McConaissance’, Mud sees McConaughey at great ease, with a drawl so low and laid back, it practically reaches his ankles. With a single look, he inspires suspicion yet still maintains a magnetic allure that he’s impossible to ignore. McConaughey makes Mud’s mysteries mythical. Yet, as good as the Texan is, the real star is young Sheridan as Ellis. With a shaky home (Ray McKinnion and Sarah Paulson star as Ellis’ parents) and little to do in the local one-horse town, Ellis could have been a standard mopey teen. Instead, over the course of the film Sheridan’s wide-eyed innocence becomes rigid determination before succumbing to childishness once more. It’s a rich and varied performance from the newcomer; woe betide any studio executive who opts to waste him on a tween-friendly franchise. Sheridan and McConaughey make Mud more than a Twain rip-off, though its myriad influences bleed in repeatedly. When it’s not being Huck Finn 2.0, it feels like a less gritty version of Stand By Me. These are high watermarks that even a talent like Nichols struggles to overcome.

As Mud runs from the law and bounty hunters towards his waiting love (Reese Witherspoon, sober), Mud runs from being southern-fried character study to something more generic by the denouement. The measured pacing of the first two-thirds meanders into gun-toting thriller territory. By that stage, though, Mud has lodged in the memory. To be more precise, McConaughey and Sheridan lodge in the memory, whilst the rest can be taken or left. Mud lacks Take Shelter’s edge but, with a hazy look and feel and winning performances, it works just fine on its own terms.

Stamp It Down!

Prince Charles image via Wikimedia Commons

Remember back in the day when we used to win so much it had an effect on the song titles?  The one that immediately springs to mind is Johnny Logan’s song ‘What’s Another Year?’, and boy does it speak volumes; such nonchalance about winning.

Nowadays, though, we seem to crave Eurovision success as much as we need economic stability – a lot. It’s interesting to note too that the other time he performed, Logan couldn’t even be bothered to finish the bloody song. Seriously, Johnny – bad form. It’s no wonder no-one votes for us anymore.

And then, way back in 1992, Linda Martin won, and she was all “Why Me?” I mean, honestly guys we couldn’t have been happy with what we had for one minute eh?

Of course then there was our most recent winner in 1996 – “The Voice” by Eimear Quinn. A song written primarily about that voice inside Irish people’s heads constantly urging them to go out and buy some drink so they can forget the horrid, incessant reality called life that  they lead. Ahem.

In short, we couldn’t have made more of a mockery out of the whole thing if we had tried.

And we did try.

Think of the once beloved Dustin the Turkey and of course, the twin-headed behemoth that is Jedward. Don’t say we didn’t try.

We used to be happy enough writing songs about our really awful and depressing weather. Remember ‘Walking the Streets in the Rain’? Whatever happened to us?

The truth is, Ireland has become irrelevant to the Eurovision song contest – we’re only there to add a bit of colour, and the even bigger truth is that we enjoy being a part of it all; a boring, drunk fixture on the bright and intriguing tapestry that is the Eurovision song contest.

In fact, there is only one way we could make other countries notice us even the slightest bit. So. A proposal for next year.

. Either that or send in Fr. Dick Byrne and Fr. Cyril McDuff’s entry ‘The Miracle is Mine’ which was actually quite a decent song, if you ask us. Well, perhaps not.

Having won a record eight times throughout the competition’s 56-year history, we’ve become akin to the retired footballer-turned grumpy pundit of Europe. And, not only that, but we actually like what we’ve become. So, while we mightn’t care one iota if we win or not, the competition will still always be close to our hearts (or…something cheesy like that).

Mark our words, when the big night comes you’ll be lounging back with a cup of tea perched on the arm of your chair, watching on, riveted, as Marty Whelan ridicules entire nations of people with his own unique brand of stinging witticisms – it’s the one day every year that Ireland launches a verbal tirade on almost every European country there is. And we call ourselves a neutral state. For shame.

“Fair play to ya, Marty – the Eurovision is a joke, alright” you’ll be shouting as you cower behind a stack of Barry’s tea boxes, a single tear rolling down your cheek.

Casting an eye back over some of Ireland’s previous entries such as Donna and Joe, Chris Doran, Brian Kennedy and Niamh Kavanagh etc. –  it’s clear they’ve all left an eclectic, oftentimes wonderful, sometimes unwatchable legacy. But the truth is, while the Eurovison may only be a competition, it’s still left an indelible mark on the Irish – buried deep in our psyche. We just don’t like to admit it that often.

So, just try and stop yourself from attending that Eurovision party or tuning in to watch when Ryan Dolan takes to the stage to represent the nation, because you won’t be able to. Not because the song is any good, but out of pure love of the competition. Right now, after years of victory, loss and annoyance at the voting system, with Ryan Dolan, Ireland’s latest entry, it seems that ‘Only Love Survives’.

Love, that is, for the irreverent, odd and often frustrating nature of the Eurovision song contest.

We still love the old bugger, even if it doesn’t love us. We’re clingy like that.

The problem with romantic scenarios is that it takes two. What if the only person that loves you is your Ma? What if you are single? What if you are just harbouring a crush on someone that you spend unhealthy amount of time Facebook stalking? What if you are with someone right now and for some inexplicable reason they haven’t declared their undying love? It has been a week already. What the hell is wrong with them?

So how do you make that new partner or crush fall in love with you? Well thankfully we saw the following link on THE INTERNET offering all the best advice and Reader? It’s confusing as bejesus.

Legal Note: This seems to be catered for lonely women who take Kate Hudson films a little too seriously. Men! If you want to make a woman love you, just adapt to these rules. Men and women are basically the same anyway because EQUALITY.

#15 You First!

This tip is perhaps the most important one. It may be cliché, but as Carrie Bradshaw once famously said, you cannot love another person and expect to be loved in return unless you love yourself first! Wise words.

You are fucking brilliant. Fight anyone who says otherwise even your crush.

#14 Don’t Overdo It

While you may think that showering your guy with affection is the way to his heart, think again! Studies have shown that guys actually find it a turn off when girls give more than they do because it turns them into more of a mother figure, rather than a friend or girlfriend.

See that person you like? Don’t even think about showing them affection. Reader… no. Put your hands away. Be a cold, lifeless shell that barely resembles a human being with a functioning soul. They’ll love it.

#13 And Action!

Sometimes it’s nice to spice things up a bit, so why not choose a date more suited to him? Guys love action-packed activities, so next time you spend time together, let him make the suggestions!

Pick a date that involves several quite genuine threats to their life and at least one explosion. Remember the end of Speed? THAT COULD BE YOU.

#12 Absence

You know what they say, absence makes the heart grow fonder! While spending lots of time together is a sure way to his heart, so is reminding him of how much he loves spending time with you!

If you love someone, you must never see them again.

#11 Take It Slow

When it comes to the physical side of your relationship, the best advice is to take it slow and allow it to develop gradually over time. This allows the two of you to build trust, one of the most important aspects of love.

You might assume the best way to approach making the sexy times is to move at a pace that is normal and natural to you. YOU ARE WRONG. Take it slow. Take it so slow that you momentarily think that the other person has drifted into a coma.

#10 Keep It Intriguing

A woman’s instinct is to share a lot all at once, so make sure you keep some intrigue! Men love a bit of mystery after all.

Tell them nothing but your name. Let them guess absolutely everything else about you.

#9 Two-Way Street

The reality is, you can’t expect him to love you if you don’t love him in return. Love is a two-way street, so make sure your desires are true, and that you don’t simply crave the affection and attention of another.

But … but you just said you can’t expect him to love you if you don’t love yourself. We are so confused.

#8 A Man’s Heart

The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, as they say. But the truth is, everyone likes to be fed! Serve him up a treat and watch him (hopefully) return the favor. Love is about all the senses after all!

Ha! Humanity. Always eating, we are. What are we like eh?  How many desserts does it take before it tastes like love? Now is your chance to find out. If food doesn’t work, replace food with vodka. Sweet, sweet vodka.

#7 Friendship = Key

While love and flirting are important, so is friendship! Love is about being best friends with one another too.

Because nothing is better than ensuring you have one foot firmly planted in ‘The Friend Zone’ so even if everything goes tits up, you can still have an excuse to spend time with them without resorting to loitering by their window in the dead of night in the rain, hoping they’ll glance outside, spot you staring lovingly and find it romantic.

#6 The Joker

Men know that women love a man who makes them laugh! If every time you see a guy and he makes you laugh, you leave him feeling good about himself. In turn, he begins to associate this feel-good rush with you, therefore leading to lots of love potential!

You know your work laugh? That laugh you laugh out of politeness when you hear those same goddamn jokes that weren’t funny the first time you heard them but you want to avoid an awkward situation. Yes. That laugh. Throw in a couple of extra giggles and you’ll have your flirty laugh down even if that person isn’t funny.

Laugh anyway because you know what’s less funny than fake laughter?

Dying alone.

#5 Confidant Woman

Relying on your man doesn’t mean being a crumbling mess without him! Men are strongly attracted to confident women who know what they want and aren’t afraid to get it! So give him reasons to admire you.

You are a strong, confident woman who does not need to smoke.

#4 Reliance Is Key

Showing him that you rely on him (not TOO much) and allowing him to also rely on you will do wonders for your relationship. This way you allow the bond to deepen, opening yourselves up for love.

First, buy 500 jars of pickles. Allow your ‘bond to deepen’ by calling him each day with a new jar of pickles to help you open. If he asks where all the pickles are going DO NOT ANSWER. It will only add to your mystery.

#3 Time = Love

Spend time together! If there is a mutal attraction to begin with, then the more time you both spend together will allow the two of you to become closer. He’ll learn to love one-on-one time with you.

He’ll learn to love one-on-one time with you … or else.

#2 Choose Similarities

Instead of dwelling on your differences, focus on your similarities instead! While sometimes you can benefit from trying new things to impress your potential lover, just make sure you don’t fake interest! He’ll be able to tell straight away.

“What a coincidence! You fabricrated your entire personality to get ME to like YOU? I fabricated my entire personality to get YOU to like ME!”

#1 Eye Spy

A US study has shown that lovers spend 75% of their time together staring one another in the eye. Ensuring that you give your crush eye-contact encourages him to look you in the eyes too, therefore encouraging his brain to think about love.

Look them in THE EYE? Ha. Well, this is embarrassing. Thanks for the advice, Internet. We were way off.

Follow these tips, Reader and you will soon find love. The Internet has never steered you wrong before.

14. The Borg Queen Dies

Star Trek Voyager’s Captain Janeway was a demon for ignoring the prime directive and getting in on some timeline-fucking-up action, so it’s only fitting that in series finale ‘Endgame’, she, well, ignores the prime directive and fucks with the timeline. The last episode of Voyager sees Admiral Janeway travelling back in time in an attempt to get Voyager’s crew home earlier and save crew lives. However, upstart Captain Janeway, or Kathryn The Younger as we like to call her, wants to use the future technology to seize the opportunity to take down the Borg, and we get this epic moment when the Borg Queen dies…

Click here to view the embedded video.

13. The Federation Commits Genocide

There’s a stunning moment in DS9 where it turns out that a secret organisation in the federation named Section 31 created the plague that killed the Changelings (i.e. Odo and the like), meaning that the Federation has essentially committed genocide. It’s notable for such moments as Julian Bashir finally being cool and features the reliably ‘ah sure jaysus’ attitude of Myles O’Brien, proving as he did so many times in DS9 that TNG’s transporter room bloke was ripe for Starfleet greatness.

Click here to view the embedded video.

12. The Trouble With Tribbles

Original Series classic ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’ was, by our estimation, the funniest episode of the series. Many years later, DS9 homage ‘Trials and Tribble-ations’ saw DS9 crew members travel back in time to the Enterprise and experience the event for themselves. (It was done using modern tech which inserted DS9 actors into old TOS footage. Slick.) It was nice because Ben Sisko is the most boring man alive and the Dominion the most yawnsome nemesis ever, so any break for LOLs has to be appreciated.

Click here to view the embedded video.

11. Sisko Thinks He’s a 20th Century Author

He’s a twentieth century boy… Remember how we literally just said Ben Sisko was one of the most boring men alive? Well, there was that time when shit got cray and he thought he was an author on Earth in the 20th century and had imaged DS9. Shits and giggles galore. We love when Trek addresses social issues from their future-perspective.

Click here to view the embedded video.

10. Tom Paris Turns Into A Lizard

Lieutenant Paris (always a toss up between himself and Chakotattooonhisface for ‘rideyest Voyager male’) gets it into his head that he wants to break Warp 10. Determined beyond belief, he eventually fulfills his aim, only to cause all manner of biological fuckery from the effect of travelling at such a speed. Cue Paris and Janeway regressing back into lizard people, engaging in some cheeky lizard sex and hoofing out some durty lizard babies. Meanwhile Voyager goes a bit Voyeur as  Chakotay states ‘I don’t know how I’m going to enter this into the log’ while Tuvoc responds ‘I look forward to reading it’. Filth.

Click here to view the embedded video.

9. Garak Admits to Being An Addict

Did we mention we love when Trek takes on social issues? Oh we did? In this episode where Garak admits to Bashir that he’s addicted to a neural transmitter and can’t give it up even though it’s killing him, we see some of DS9′s most sharply observed character interaction. We may think Ben Sisko’s a bit of a wash but we have to admit that there really are some great character moments in federation outpost Deep Space 9.

Click here to view the embedded video.

8. Data Takes Over the Enterprise

Data’s a stone cold badass. Taking over the ship. Impersonating Captain Picard. Not to mention the cascading forcefield sequence rocks our frigging socks. You must watch this one.

Click here to view the embedded video.

7. Picard Does a Mind Meld

Those Vulcans and their mind melding, huh? Here, Jean  Luc mind melds with Sarek and takes on his emotions. Patrick Stewart at his best, not to mention some Crusher/Picard action. “Beverly!” “I’m here Jean Luc, I’m not going anywhere.” Swoon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

6. Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Dogs of War

Is there anything more terrifying than a Klingon twirling around in his chair, cackling? Could there be anything cooler than William Shatner and Christopher Plummer sharing a scene? It’s Star Trek VI, baby…

Click here to view the embedded video.

5. Captain Sisko Hits Q

We can’t help loving Q. He’s a messer and a bit of a jerk but oh hell, he’s just fun. Remember when he wants to get Janeway knocked up? Remember when he sorta kinda sticks the Enterprise in the path of the Borg? Oh that Q! Here, he even knocks some shade of interesting out of Ben Sisko. (There we go, ragging on Ben Sisko again, for balance we ought acknowledge that some Rampers actually like him.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

4. Odyssey Encounters the Jem’Hadar

There’s a comment on the YouTube clip for this one which states: “A piece of shrapnel ripped off the nacell, what a poorly built class of starship”. This tickled us no end and made us imagine that the author was Fr Liam from Fr Ted. Shoddy, shoddy workmanship!

Click here to view the embedded video.

3. In the Pale Moonlight

I lied. I cheated. I bribed men to cover the crimes of other men.

Oh fine then. Sisko had his moments.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2. Q Gets His Powers Back

No serious we fucking love Q. And we love how annoyed he makes Picard. And we love how super awkward he makes Ryker. And we ADORE that he gives Data the gift of laughter. No Trek scene is more wonderful.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. Picard Meets God

We mean if anyone gets to meet the maker.

“The universe is not so badly designed!” – oh, Jean Luc.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s such a great number of factors in gaming that go against the Vita’s inherent characteristics, its very existence comes as a surprise. Firstly, the landscape of portable gaming is much different now than it was a couple of years ago. Like it or not, we’re living a post iOS world, where devices dedicated solely to games are of much less necessity. Mobile phones have begun to pack within them a surprising amount of raw power. Who would have thought something like Infinity Blade would even be capable of running on the same device as WhatsApp so soon? But more importantly, the availability of extremely cheap 99c games, that are capable of being played on something few of us ever leave the house without, opens the door to a staggeringly large and varied potential demographic. And most of this audience, especially in the tough economic times we live in, aren’t willing to fork out the cash for what they perceive as unnecessarily specialised consumer electronics.

Of course, there will always remain be a dedicated crowd whose needs aren’t met by the App or Play store, otherwise the Vita or the 3DS might not have made it this far. It’s an unquestionably more hostile environment now though, making survival that much more difficult. When Nintendo launched the 3DS after the astonishing success of the DS, it was assumed that a favourable commercial outcome was guaranteed; this wasn’t to be the case. The 3DS struggled for some time, with both an underwhelming line-up and sales figures, so much so that Nintendo slashed the price significantly after just six months. Recently, it’s been looking much brighter with increased sales figures and a general air of positivity. With the right games, price, and the benefit of a reputation as a family company who know handheld gaming, they’ve been able to turn things around. Sony, on the other hand, don’t seem to have any of these crucial ingredients for success.

Thomas Was Alone is part of the first wave of indie hits heading to Vita

That isn’t to belittle the developers Sony does have under its wing; the likes of Santa Monica Studios and Naughty Dog have created some great games this past generation. But in the portable space, such a thing has never happened. Certainly they’ve had the odd success, but they’re too few and far between and despite their mainstream appeal, haven’t pulled in a big enough crowd. And their more experimental efforts have fared even worse, such as the joyful LocoRoco from Studio Japan but these imaginative titles also failed to find themselves a viable audience. Perhaps it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of just what it is that consumers want in a handheld game. With the PSP, Sony’s philosophy was to recreate a console-like experience on a smaller screen, which was terribly misguided then and remains so now. They do seem to have at least gotten better at delivering what one might call a ‘console experience’ in bite size chunks, the greater power of the Vita and its dual analogue sticks having been a huge help in this regard. But the continued lack of commercial success from this angle should be serve as an obvious warning that this isn’t the right approach. What the system needs is exclusives, designed and tailored with the Vita’s many considerable specific strengths in mind. And so far, we just haven’t seen enough of that.

Sony do have to be commended for attempting to redirect some of their efforts. In the past few months, a surprisingly large amount of indie developers have pledged their support to the system, citing a very positive working relationship with the company. Many of the games in question already exist on the PC and home consoles but the significance of their portable début shouldn’t be underestimated; Hotline Miami, Spelunky, Thomas Was Alone, and more, are all hugely appealing portable prospects. It may not provide a massive boost in hardware sales but if Sony can carve out a place for the Vita as the go to indie games machine, it would certainly help to please an increasingly hungry portion of the existing fan-base. Tied into this strategy of courting of indies, is Cross-Buy, which allows a single purchased copy to be played on both PS3 and Vita; it’s a clever and tempting value proposition for sure, especially with save game transfers. A huge amount of these smaller games have begun to support this feature, such as the charming Guacamelee and it seems like it will only become more commonplace in the future, especially in light of Sony’s impressive early emphasis on Vita / PS4 communication.

It might just be that there isn’t a place in the market for a Sony crafted handheld anymore. Even if the platform ends up with some more must-play titles (Media Molecule’s Tearaway seems like the best contender to fit this bill at the moment) it’s entirely possible that the demographic they’re targeting is no longer a reality. With Nintendo, you have a family friendly name that requires less of a financial investment, one with a storied history that commands a certain level of assured quality when it comes to portable gaming, something the 3DS is definitely beginning to live up to. Public perception of Sony as makers of handheld gaming devices may just be too weak to ever allow the Vita to perform well commercially.

It is still relatively early days though. A regular smattering of indie darlings, with the odd exclusive in between, might be enough to validate the Vita’s continued existence. But outside of the dedicated core who are in it for the long run regardless of what happens, a comeback seems more and more unlikely. We may very well be witnessing Sony’s second and final foray into handheld gaming.

1: Ulster top the log

From a winning start to the year, Ulster’s form dipped in 2013, though the Ravenhill massive will be happy to keep the top spot going into the semis. With injuries clearing up, a leader with a point to prove in Best, and captain Muller marshaling the pack, the Northerners will have a good crack at the title. Their knockout journey begins with Scarlets next Friday, a hurdle that should be relatively simple.

2: Undeserved send off for Eric

Connacht went down fighting at home in the Sportsground for Eric Elwood’s last game, though it wasn’t nearly enough to take out an in form Glasgow team. Incoming subs Matawalu and Maitland warmed the Warriors up for another crack at the R.D.S. next weekend, while good old Eric bid a fond farewell. Samoan Pat Lam will take the reins for next year, and Connacht have already made some interesting signings – a NZ U20 capped young openside is said to be the latest.

3: 3 games towards two trophies for Leinster

Facing into a Summer of huge turnover, Leinster look set to give a few nice send offs, after a convincing win over former bogeymen Ospreys. Missing some key men, the Welsh side was fairly comfortably dispatched in the end, with both Jack McGrath and late inclusion Jack McGrath impressing. Departing wing Andrew Conway showed three glimpses of the talent he has all to infrequently delivered on in blue, while another departure, Jamie Hagan held up well in the scrum again.

4: Lions doesn’t live up to the hype, yet…

Despite Sky Sports going into overdrive with grainy shots of tours gone by and re-runs of BOD’s famous 2001 break, the Lions announcement left most feeling a little flat. Gatland, predictably, went for a Welsh captain, with Rory Best the biggest absentee.

The lack of playmakers looks like the biggest worry for the tour, and an injury to Sexton will mean a blunt edge to the backline. Bench impact could be vital, while Irish Lions will make up the backbone of the team, with likely starters at LH, SR, 6, 10 and 13.

5: Leinster close in on their man

With just two guaranteed games left in Joe Schmidt’s Leinster reign of power at this point, the men upstairs seem to have decided on the next power shift. Former Leicester Tigers head coach Matt O’Connor, an Aussie backline and defence guru, will likely be announced as the new man in charge this week. O’Connor has led Leicester to numerous European knockouts and to Aviva silverware. Crucially for Leinster though, he’s a hungry, detail oriented ‘young’ coach with a focus on attacking rugby and a willingness to be in charge. This looks like another appointment in the mould of a Cheika or Schmidt. Time will tell whether he’ll be as effective.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. The intro:

Part of the intro. The cut-scenes are all in this lovely retro 80's video game style.

You and your Best Buddy are flying to this mysterious island when enemies attack. You grab the minigun, muttering “I’m gonna have me some fun…”, and the  music breaks out into Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally, from the iconic chopper scene in Predator, as you’re given control and mow down hordes of troops, jeeps and enemy choppers before the cut-scene resumes. This tongue-in-cheek reference sets the scene perfectly for the rest of the game. Don’t worry folks, that’s only the last half of the intro. The other half is similarly humorous and cheesier than underneath a slovenly cheddar-golem’s foreskin.

2. The soundtrack and story:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Far Cry 3, as you might recall from our Colm’s review, was really rather good. If there were any gripes to be had, it was that the story was a bit all over the place, and the music was on the whole rather uninspiring. Blood Dragon improves upon its parent game with the style one would expect of an 80′s homage. The music is a sublime mix of every action film you can remember, with military staccato drums (and plenty of electronic tom-toms, naturally) blending with wailing guitar solos and cheesy synths. It absolutely nails the 80′s soundtrack. There are bits you’ll swear were lifted straight out of Predator, or one of those awful scifi films Michael Douglas starred in that you’re ashamed to admit having enjoyed.

The story is much more focused too, being rather more direct than Far Cry’s rambly pseudo-mystical bollocks. In the distant future of 2007AD, nuclear war has engulfed the planet. You’re Cyber-commando Rex Power Colt, sent to investigate an island invasion, and what you thought was a terrorist force turns out to be your old unit, led by your old commander General Sloan. He’s gone rogue because apparently nuking the whole of Canada to stop the Russians invading wasn’t going far enough. He mops the floor with you and leaves you for dead in a nest of radioactive dinosaurs that shoot lasers from their eyes, because why the hell not? These are the titular Blood Dragons, and apparently drinking their blood made Sloan’s cybernetics super-powerful. You decline to enhance yourself similarly, because Winners Don’t Do Drugs, and set out with what few allies you have left to reclaim the island and finish Sloan off. As far as I can tell, any plot holes are absolutely deliberate, and referenced all the time with characters saying things like “Oh, did I not mention the mega-cyber-death ray? I could have SWORN I did…” It’s gloriously cheesy method of driving the game along.

3. The nods to the action movie greats:

This is what came before the Bro-fist. Real men made friends through the power of BICEPS.

Every time you enter zoom mode to tag enemies you get the Predator Vision sound. The villain General Sloan is pretty much Bennet from Commando with some robot bits. He even has the same string vest. The Path of the Hunter quests from Far Cry are now called Path of the Predator (and their plots are generally quite silly: ‘Cyber-soldiers are causing trouble on that hill- and they’re LITTERING! Take ‘em out!’). Rex Colt himself is voiced by none other than Michael Fucking Biehn, who you’ll all remember as Corporal Hicks in Aliens and Kyle Reese in Terminator. And if you don’t remember, hang your head in shame, youngster.

The missions and areas are plenty different, requiring new tactics almost every time. As a result, it never gets dull. And most of them reference a classic film. One moment you’re planting C4000 (As the game says, ‘it’s like C4, but we added some zeroes’) on a massive hydroelectric dam, the next you’re racing across the island in a jeep, or descending into the bowels of a Blood Dragon nest with a flamethrower and the dreadful suspicion that there will be a load of Aliens references. And the game does not disappoint. It even throws in a bunch of dreadful puns. Within the first hour of play I’d simply lost count of how many movie references had been made. Even though these ‘homages’ are blatantly transparent, the game manages to pull off its wholesale plagiarism in an utterly respectful, even loving fashion.

4. The sense of humour:

THE FUTURE IS NEON.

Close to the start, Sloan expresses amusement that the US sent you after him. he exclaims “Now that right there is the definition of insanity!”, a lovely nod to Vaas from Far Cry 3. The game breaks the 4th wall quite often. Troops are regularly ordered to guard the Incredibly Vulnerable Maguffin. Facility announcements frequently give away gaping security holes or the positions of powerful weapons. All the Far Cry animals are in there, but they’re CYBER-animals now. Possibly because the devs couldn’t pass up the chance to have someone exclaim “Release the cyber-sharks!” On that note there’s a moment in the game where you’re fleeing an underground lab in a jeep, and you must leap over a broken bridge with a giant cyber-shark-monster at the bottom. Your on-board AI says ‘Objectives updated – You must jump the shark.” I must also mention the helpful loading-screen hints, such as ‘Buy ammo, or you can’t shoot’, or ‘hints on the loading screens will give you hints’, or ‘We spent most of our budget on awesome green text‘.

5. The Tutorial:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In-game tutorials usually assume you’re a total fucking idiot who never before encountered a control pad or a mouse/keyboard, and that you’ve no idea how to use either to play a game. Blood Dragon highlights how big publishers have a crippling fear of giving their customers a shred of credit by providing the most amusing starting tutorial ever devised by humankind. All the way through it, poor Rex keeps complaining that he bloody knows that running is faster than walking, and that he just wants to kill things already for fuck’s sake. Watch it above, in all its patronising glory.

I could have gone into detail about the mechanics, but if you’ve played Far Cry 3 or read a review, you already know how the game actually plays. Actually, the Blood Dragons themselves bear mention. They’re gigantic, they’re very tough, and they shoot frickin’ lasers from their eyes. Their eyesight is terrible but their hearing and smell are great, so it’s very possible (and on the harder settings sometimes necessary) to lure them into enemy bases to soften up the defences. Of course the bases have Mega-shields that stop the Dragons getting in, so you still have to turn them off from the inside, while avoiding the massive firepower of the enemy and any dragons that wander by. They’re a welcome addition to the mix.

In conclusion, Far Cry 3 itself is an excellent game, and Blood Dragon refines it, mostly by throwing in a cheesy mish-mash of classic action flicks and turning everything up to 11. Sure, it’s shorter than FC3, but it’s also way cheaper, more focused, punchier, and lacking in any of the samey dull parts that got in the way of the original’s fun. Blood Dragon is probably the most fun I’ve had with my pants on. And I’ve had sex with my pants on. It is easily worth the €15 or so asking price. A tongue-in-cheek, balls-to-the-wall, utterly shameless (and very proud of it) explosive romp through the greatest decade of action film mankind has ever known. Daddy likes.

Or are they? In an attempt to make myself feel a little better, I’ve listed a bunch of everyday horrors that, while not being as eventfully awful as a bad toothache, are far more likely to be permanent weekly fixtures in your otherwise fulfilling life. No one’s safe from these babies. Karmic balance means nothing to them.

1. Papercuts

Papercuts hurt like no other cut; stinging, needling, wheedling little zingers that don’t give you reason enough to head for painkillers but still fuck up everything from typing an email to washing your hands. May we remind you how floppy and weak paper is? Look at it this way; in the world of injury-by-wild-animal, getting cut by a sheet of paper is the equivalent of being decapitated by a cockroach. Man, fuck papercuts.

2. Kneecapping yourself off the underside of your desk

So you’re halfway through an Excel sheet and you feel the need to change position, little knowing that your brain has already sent a message to every nerve ending in your body to rush like a battalion of riot police to the tip of your kneecap, so that they can raise voice as one into a transcendent aria of purest, jaw-gapingest pain. Whacking your kneecap off the underside of your desk is worse than stubbing your toe. Yes it is. It totally is.

3. No smartphone

What time is the next train? How much is £9.99 in euros? What’s that word for the thing you’re thinking of? How do you spell internitme intremidd intermittent? How many Best Actor Oscars has Tom Hanks won? What time is the golf on? All these and many other weightless but consequently frustrating questions will pop into your head, at breakneck speed, the second you realise you left your smartphone at home. And worse, your internet-ravaged attention span will mean you’ll forget your smartphone is AWOL before each new question, causing you to mindlessly reach for your pocket/bag before snapping your hand back in white-hot rage time, after time, after time.

4. Late bus

Oh for GOD’S SAKE. You’ve got a million things to do, it’s cold, it’s starting to rain, there’s THIS MUCH traffic, and there’s no bus. Five minutes is a thousand years when you’re waiting on public transport, and there’s something about a bus even slightly delayed that turns us all into cantankerous city bankers with fuse-fizzled TNT up our holes.

5. Ill-fitting underwear

Anything that sidles up the crack of your arse uninvited is a bad thing. That goes for you too, bra straps and crotch-sagging tights. And we all know that there are just some social occasions where you can’t be seen hopping around on one foot with your entire fist inside your trousers.

6. Stuffed nose

When your nose is blocked, there’s only one thing you can think about, and it’s not what you’re having for dinner or whether or not the Fitzgibbon account is secured. Having a stubbornly blocked nose means that everything outside your nasal passages becomes moot, null, void or anathema. The nose is everything. Oh my nose. My poor nose. I can’t breathe. My nose. My nose is blocked. Oh my nose.

7. Loading instead of saving

So you know when you’ve just come past a really challenging part of whatever video game you’re wasting your life on, and you’ve done it well, as quickly and as cleanly as an Irish Mammy plucking dirty socks from her adult son’s bedroom floor (‘Ma! Get out! This is my alone time!’)? And then you go to save, but you skip right past the Save option, settle on Load, and end up back where you started for no good reason but your own lapse in functionality. Joypad-through-the-telly time.

8. Not getting a text back even though you just replied to a text

‘Hey, are you around Sat lunchtime?’

‘Yup, sure am. Why?’

*radio silence*

FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUU!

9. Dreaming that you just got up

You get up, blearily get out of your jammies, shower, brush your teeth, go downstairs, crack open a boiled egg, realise you never have boiled eggs, wake up.

10. Spots where you can’t hide them

It’s bad enough that medical science was lying when it said spots were only for teenagers, but getting a spot (at the grand old age of twenty-seven) right on your cheek/chin/side of your mouth/under your nose? That’s just not right. And it always happens right before an occasion during which someone will take zany photos with the potential of showcasing to a huge audience the spontaneous joy of your social life, but which will instead showcase to Mark Zuckerberg and his evil empire the spontaneous eruptions of your facial plains. Woe.

11. Barking dogs

The worst thing about barking dogs is that you can’t really berate them for barking. They could well be barking because there’s a prowler on the loose, who may or may not be of the feline persuasion. Or the postman’s coming. Or they’re hungry. Or they’re thrilled. Or there’s a crow. In short, dogs bark and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it, which sucks because after ten minutes of it you’ll plump for being robbed or pecked to pieces by a Hitchcockian flock over listening to one more canine interjection.

12. Sore feet

See ‘stuffed nose’. When you’ve got sore feet the only thing you can think about is how sore your feet are and how much you look forward to a time when your feet aren’t sore, which may as well be a million years away because sore feet sore feet sore feet sore feet.

13. Lukewarm coffee

‘Well, I’m delighted I got that paragraph down. Thesis, let’s be having you. It’s looking a bit more even now, and I have the run of my thoughts beautifully. I shall take a congratulatory sip of my coffee while I ponder how to open the nex… SPLEEEAARGH! THIS TASTES LIKE SPIT!’

14. iPod battery dying just as you get on public transport

Looks like you’re going to have to spend the journey listening to students loudly broadcasting their radical adventures with jagerbombs and ostentatious sex.

15. Waving at the wrong person

They wave. You panic. Do they know you? Do you know them? Fuck, you’re sure if they come a little closer you’ll know them and you can’t not wave when they could be someone you know who will then go on to call you a snobby fuck for the remainder of the calendar year. You wave. Hold on. Are they cross-eyed or… looking at… someone… behind you… You hurriedly reassign your raised hand as a scratching post for your right boob.

16. Making that farting noise on a leather couch with strangers present

You didn’t fart and you can prove it. Cue panicked booty-shaking against the upholstery as the polite company you’ve just compromised fish their monocles out of their sherries and proclaim that bowel control isn’t what it used to be. The fart police, kids. Ever vigilant.

McLaren in particular are struggling to reach the heights of 2012, and cannot compete at the front. The new car has been so poor, they actually considered reverting to last season’s model. However, they have persisted, with Jenson Button doing a majestic job keeping the car in the top 10 and scoring points. Sergio Perez hasn’t been doing so well, struggling for pace and competing with the lower teams. Evidence from Bahrain shows he may have turned a corner, but he still has a lot to learn if he wants to stay with a top team, or more importantly, to convince a top team to stick with him.

We’ve seen impressive performances from Mercedes. Hamilton has managed a top 5 finish in every race so far, which is unprecedented for a driver in a new team. The Mercedes has been very fast in qualifying, securing pole via Rosberg in Bahrain, but has struggled for consistent race pace on longer stints. While Rosberg has largely gone backwards during races, most recently falling from 1st to 9th in Bahrain, Hamilton is showing some real power, improving from 9th to 5th in the same race. So mixed fortunes for Mercedes so far, but a competitive start nonetheless.

The Red Bull of Vettel has been dominant, controversially passing Webber to take the win in Malaysia, ignoring team orders to the contrary; missing out on a podium in China by 2 tenths of a second, and winning the Bahrain GP with 20 seconds to spare. The issue of team orders is a thorny one, but thankfully, most teams have relaxed the orders since this incident, and have allowed their drivers to race. When the past few titles came down to the final races with a handful of points separating the top drivers, you can’t blame the drivers for wanting to secure every possible point. And I’m sure the paying spectators want to see what they’ve paid to see: a race.

Kimi Raikonnen won the opening race in Melbourne, has finished on the podium in two of the other three races, and lies second in the Driver’s championship, proving Lotus still have the consistency and race-winning ability they developed last season. What’s also worrying for the other teams is that after a poor result in Melbourne, it hasn’t taken Red Bull longer to catch up with the other teams than it did in 2012. Vettel won his second race this season, but had to wait 4 races last year before they were up to speed. So, it might be looking ominous; Red Bull with 2 wins from 4 races. Lotus are looking quite competitive now also, Grosjean making up 9 places to snatch a 3rd place podium finish in Bahrain, at the expense of Scotland’s Paul Di Resta in the Force India, who drove an excellent race, and is still fighting for his first ever F1 podium finish.

The Ferraris have shown excellent race pace, and are consistently finishing well. Massa has turned over a new leaf and is showing some speed again, while Alonso secured a win in China. However, they’re not without their faults. A poor judgement call by the team cost Alonso the race in Malaysia, forced to retire as he started his second lap after breaking his front wing. Massa has also suffered, most recently in Bahrain, with two tyre blow-outs, and at the same race, Alonso’s DRS wing failed, knocking him out of the running. If not for these problems, Ferrari would be in a much better position than they are now, and could have been leading the championship. This should be very disappointing for them, as this has been their most promising start to a season after a number of years playing catch up.

So, if Ferrari don’t get their act together in time for the Barcelona GP, we could be looking at a 2 horse race for the championship between Red Bull and Lotus. But there’s opportunity for Ferrari, Mercedes, and even Force India to push on over the next three races in Barcelona, Monaco and Montreal, and establish themselves also as genuine title challengers. With big changes coming to the sport in 2014, it’s understandable that teams may have one eye on next season and be investing less this season; this might explain McLaren’s lack of competitiveness, but the onus is on all teams to keep bringing the goods to the table, and team orders aside, race right to the end.

Featured Image, ‘Vettel, Infiniti Red Bull’ ©2013 Mubarak Fahad and used under this Creative Commons licence.

The damaged landing gear leads to mid-air panic at the prospect of a crash. As the plane circles the skies looking for a possible safe landing spot, it’s up to the three dedicated air stewards Joserra (Javier Cámara), Ulloa (Raúl Arévalo) and Fajas (Carlos Areces) to keep the handful of first-class passengers calm. How? By doping them with drugged cocktails and instigating sing-songs and a bit of an orgy. As you do. I’m So Excited is a pitch-perfect definition of ‘high camp’. Besides taking place for the most part on an aeroplane and getting its characters high, it’s more camp than a group of camp campsite owners in a camper van on a Christmas cruise on the Love Boat. Besides the three prancing stewards, you have the sexually frustrated pilots, the virgin psychic (Lola Duenas) and the aging dominatrix (Cecilia Roth), all randy as heck and mescalined to the eyeballs. Cue panting.

This is Almodóvar’s half-hearted effort to hearken back to earlier, funnier films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, but what he thinks is funny feels limp at best and self-indulgent at worst. As the crew and passengers fantasize about each other and the possibility of their impending doom, this mile-high club of misfits becomes simply boring by the time the climax comes around. Considering the richness of the characters in the likes of The Skin I Live In and Talk To Her, this bunch are decidedly forgettable.

Admittedly, some scenes do hit the right notes. The highlight sees the stewards lip-syncing to the Pointer Sisters song from which the film gets its English title. Meanwhile, the efforts of some other passengers to communicate with loved ones on the ground hint at the more genuine, better film this could have been. However, Almodóvar tiptoes around darkness and satire at every opportunity. For example, whilst all the debauchery goes on in first class, the second-class passengers and crew are all sound asleep on tranquilizers. The whole Peninsula flight is going down while the first class  are having fun and the second-class folks are doped up? It’s a gentle prod where an in-form Almodóvar might have made a killer blow.

I’m So Excited is so light that it is doomed to flit from the mind of all but the hardcore Almodóvar fans, but even they will find it hard to forgive the grating campness and the toothless bite. It’s unfortunate to see him follow up one of his darkest and best films with one of his weakest. I’m So Excited is a distracting romp, but it barely takes off when it should soar.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The following list includes people who ostensibly destroyed their career with their ill-advised decisions, while some managed to recover in spite of themselves.

As Marlon Brando might say, this is a compilation of 17 people who could’ve been a contender at one stage or another (for an Oscar, or at least, significant critical respect).

17. Melanie Griffith turned down Kim Basingner’s role in LA Confidential

Why she was mad to turn it down: It could have revitalised her ailing film career; instead it revitalised Kim Basinger’s ailing film career.

16. Denzel Washington turned down Brad Pitt’s role in Seven

Why he was mad to turn it down: His film career has been pretty ‘meh’ since (with the notable exception of American Gangster), and starring in Seven would have gone some way towards reversing his decline.

15. John Travolta turned down Tom Hanks’ role in Forrest Gump

Why he was mad to turn it down: It consolidated Hanks’ status as the most-loved actor in Hollywood. It even makes people willing to forgive Hanks for the series of bad movies he’s made since. Travolta, on the other hand, not so much.

14. Mel Gibson turned down Russell Crowe’s role in Gladiator

Why he was mad to turn it down: Mel Gibson has badly needed something to repair his image for a long time now. Appearing in a film as fun and memorable as Gladiator would have been a big step in the right direction.

13. Johnny Depp turned down Matthew Broderick’s role in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Why he was mad to turn it down: Depp is cool enough as it is, but he missed a trick by not taking on the role of Ferris Bueller. Oh well, pobody’s nerfect.

12. Matt Damon turned down Aaron Eckhart’s role in The Dark Knight

Why he was mad to turn it down: Granted, Damon isn’t exactly struggling to get offered roles. Still though, why would you reject the chance to appear in the film that reinvented superhero movies?

11. Sean Connery turned down Ian McKellen’s role in Lord of the Rings

Why he was mad to turn it down: Question: What was Sean Connery doing instead in the early ’00s? Answer: Appearing in films that were nowhere near as good or popular as the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

10. Mickey Rourke turned down Bruce Wilis’ role in Pulp Fiction

Why he was mad to turn it down: Rourke hadn’t appeared in a decent film for ages by that stage, and he wouldn’t for a long time thereafter.

9. Halle Berry turned down Sandra Bullock’s role in Speed 

Why she was mad to turn it down: While Berry became a star eventually anyway, starring in Speed would have quickened the process considerably.

8. Russell Crowe turned down Laurence Fishburne’s role in The Matrix

Why he was mad to turn it down: Because he would never again have to put up with being described as ‘hot headed,’ if he chose to play such an archetypally cerebral character.

7. Emily Watson turned down Audrey Tautou’s role in Amelie

Why she was mad to turn it down: It was just SUCH A GOOD ROLE!!!

6. Jake Gyllenhaal turned down Sam Worthington’s role in Avatar

Why he was mad to turn it down: Possessing considerable levels of indie cred, as Gyllenhaal does, is all well and good, but turning down the highest-grossing film of all time?! That must have cost him a lot of money.

5. Edward Norton turned down Matt Damon’s role in Saving Private Ryan

Why he was mad to turn it down: Because he made American History X instead, which did his reputation (as a person rather than an actor) no favours whatsoever.

4. Jeremy Irons turned down Anthony Hopkins’ role in Silence of the Lambs

Why he was mad to turn it down: If he had taken on the role, he may well now have two Best Actor Oscars to his name rather than just one.

3. Al Pacino turned down Harrison Ford’s role in Star Wars

Why he was mad to turn it down: Over the years, Pacino has increasingly acquired a reputation for playing characters that are inherently humourless and invariably show embarrassing levels of hysteria. A leading role in Star Wars would have surely represented a nice departure from the norm.

2. Bill Murray turned down Michael Keaton’s role in Batman

Why he was mad to turn it down: Bill Murray as Batman would quite possibly have been the greatest/funniest thing ever. Plus, he would have showed more charisma in one scene than Keaton did in the entirety of his stint in the role.

1. Molly Ringwald turned down Julia Roberts’ role in Pretty Woman

Why she was mad to turn it down: You just need to take one look at their respective post-Pretty Woman careers to know why.

And one instance of a person being considered for a role but thankfully never cast…

Woody Allen in Tom Cruise’s role in Eyes Wide Shut

Why he wasn’t mad to go nowhere near it: Because no one wants to see Woody Allen in a graphic sex scene.

There are a few things I miss though, probably the biggest one being decent radio. Flicking through the stations here at any given time all I hear is Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Metallica, Pink Floyd or Pearl Jam. All great bands with great songs but when they’re on constantly on several frequencies they start to grate on the nerves. There are a few Latino and R&B stations too, but I’m not that desperate yet. At home I usually listen to Pandora, which plays exactly the music I want to hear but lacks the companionship live radio gives. I tried using the Irish radio apps but the time difference is too disconcerting. Listening to DJs commiserate with those stuck in home time traffic over lunch or being lulled to sleep while I’m cooking dinner doesn’t work for me. Also, the daily uproars about issues I know and care less and less about makes me feel less like I have radio companions and more like I’m living on a completely different planet.

I spoke to a guy from Dublin who has been here for 25 years. He told me a sad truth about being an expatriate. He said that I will always be a foreigner here. I will be completely accepted and welcomed but I would always be known and thought of as ‘the Irish woman’. He also said that the longer I stay away from Ireland the more foreign I will become there too. The less I will feel like I belong there and I will in effect become nationless. My kids, on the other hand, will be completely American in ten years. At the moment, I still refer to Ireland as ‘back home’. I still make comparisons between prices. I still think in euro and the metric system and centigrade. When I’m driving I sometimes find my left hand searching for a gear stick and even though I ask the attendant for gas it’s because I noticed the car needed petrol. I do feel these subconscious happenings slowly changing. I don’t have to convert Fahrenheit in my head to know if the kids need a jacket or not anymore. I know my weight in pounds, the date with the month first and I can refer to people’s pants without smirking now. I don’t think I’ll ever respond to the word ‘fanny’ with a straight face though. There are some things that just sound plain wrong.

I’m guessing that my new career will speed these changes in me up a lot. There will be whole new worlds of people who simply won’t understand me if I don’t adjust my language and pronunciation accordingly. I’m finding it all very exciting now that I was accepted to the fellowship. I may well be half way down the road to national identity limbo but I certainly feel like I’m in the right place right now.

At best, efforts such as Lassie and March of the Penguins seem well-intentioned but laborious viewing, and at worst, they come across as cynical cash-ins. And unfortunately, Chimpanzee does little to enhance the animal movie genre’s reputation.

The Disneynature-made documentary, which was assisted by World Chimpanzee Foundation head Christophe Boesch and follows on from previous successful films by the company such as Earth and Oceans, focuses on… erm, you guessed it, the chimpanzee, which is considered far more intelligent than the majority of other animals, thus resembling humans more so than most. And it is our common ground with these creatures that the documentary seeks to promote (such connections will seem especially stark to anyone who’s walked down Grafton Street late on a Friday night when sober).

In many ways, the story’s classical structure is reminiscent of the fictional tales that Disney normally specialises in. It concerns Oscar, a chimpanzee born into a family of 35, and whose life is threatened by the invasion of the aptly-named Scar and other chimpanzees, who look to take their precious nut grove from them.

The situation worsens as Oscar’s mother, Isha, passes away, thereby drastically diminishing the younger chimpanzee’s hopes of survival, as he has no one to care for him. Yet almost miraculously, Freddy, the leader of the group defending themselves from Scar’s invaders, elects to effectively adopt Oscar – a highly unusual phenomenon in the animal kingdom – thus improving his chances of survival considerably.

Nonetheless, Freddy’s group must still cope with the pressure of Scar and his clan constantly scheming against them and taking their resources by force, and it is on this cliffhanger that the movie rests.

The film is obviously a labour of love for its makers – directors Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield, along with their crew, spent over three years in the jungles of Uganda and Ivory Coast while making the documentary. And such persistence is partially rewarded, as there are some beautiful shots and remarkable scenes of natural life permeating the film. The close-up shots of chimpanzees using a stick to eat ants or stealing honey from a bee hive are especially spectacular.

Yet one of the issues these types of documentaries always face is the question of why it deserves to be shown in the movie theatre, rather than merely getting air time on the National Geographic TV channel. And Chimpanzee is patently at least somewhat aware of this pitfall, as it makes some attempts to be cinematic.

Tim Allen is in the Morgan Freeman role of narrator, but clearly, he doesn’t quite have the gravitas of the Shawshank Redemption star. And not only is Allen not Morgan Freeman; he’s also distractingly irritating owing to the tone of forced kookiness that tends to inflect his assertions. Couldn’t we instead just have a normal, non-celebrity narrator, who describes what’s happening in an unaffected manner? Moreover, Allen disingenuously portrays Scar as the villain, when in actual fact, he’s simply looking after his own survival amid the harsh conditions of the jungle.

What’s more, while the film’s Hollywood-esque-but-true story helps it to work as cinema to a degree, it often goes too far in exploiting the inherent drama of the plot. For instance, certain scenes’ utilisation of classical music to sensationalise particularly important moments feels contrived and even a little gimmicky. It could be argued that these musical cues are performed in order to make it more accessible to Disney’s traditional family audience, but the best of the company’s films tend to work for children without appearing to dumb themselves down, so Chimpanzee should surely be held to the same standards.

And the story itself, while fascinating enough, never really has you on the edge of your seat or desperate to know what will happen next. In the end, in spite of everything, you’re still left thinking that it would’ve made a perfectly good National Geographic documentary.

Click here to view the embedded video.

21 and Over revolves around the antics of Miller and Casey, two long-time friends who worry that they are growing increasingly apart, owing to the fact they now live in separate areas of the country, as Casey attends a college that Miller says he was ‘too dumb’ to get into.

To partially make up for the lack of time spent together, they endeavour to visit a mutual friend of theirs, Jeff Chang, in conjunction with the latter’s 21st birthday. Miller, in line with his hedonistic philosophy and reputation as a troublemaker, is intent on taking Jeff out for a night of drunken shenanigans. However, the less freewheeling Jeff is under pressure from his overbearing, control freak father to get a good night’s sleep, as he has an important med school interview the next morning which could prove vital to his future prospects.

Inevitably though, Jeff eventually agrees to go out for ‘one drink’, and pandemonium ensues (the phrase ‘I think we killed Jeff Chang’ is uttered more than once thereafter).

The film is not particularly original – not only does it take the basic plot of The Hangover and tweak it slightly, but its core relationship between Miller and Casey has a near-identical dynamic to the one involving the characters played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera in Superbad. Casey, a la Cera’s character, is the academically bright, overly uptight one, and Miller is the feckless, fun-loving one, who is obsessed with lewd jokes and whose sole intention seems to be causing trouble.

These two characters are played rather well by Miles Teller (Rabbit Hole) and Skylar Astin (Pitch Perfect), with the former in particular performing with a conspicuous degree of gusto and confidence in the role, which suggests he could achieve great things with a better script.

Yet the fact that the movie is less than innovative is not necessarily a flaw. After all, Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman and many others have made several films that are broadly similar over the course of their careers, and enjoyed a great deal of success in the process. Just because filmmakers who are perceived as inferior engage in a similar practice does not therefore mean their subsequent efforts should be dismissed out of hand.

However, the parallels with Superbad and The Hangover turn into a problem when it becomes apparent that 21 and Over contains nowhere near as many laughs as either of the aforementioned films. Swearing, toilet humour and ironic racism can be funny when they’re being used to make subtle and perceptive points (see: South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut). However, in this case, such humour all too often feels like a lazy reflex seeking cheap laughs, and at its worst, is genuinely offensive – the film features angry Latinos, humourless Serbs and countless other stereotypes. And worse still is the serious sub-plot, concerning Jeff’s possible suicidal tendencies. This storyline, in which Miller and Casey receive sporadic insights into their friend’s troubling behaviour from those who go to college with him, is patently underdeveloped and thus comes across as almost an afterthought – hardly an appropriate way to deal with such a sensitive issue.

It’s also likely to leave those who promote responsible alcohol consumption less than thrilled – as well as encompassing copious vomiting and a spot of drink driving, one scene that epitomises 21 and Over’s vulgarity involves Jeff getting so drunk that he stands on top of a bar counter and urinates all over the unimpressed onlookers beneath him.

Yet while the jokes sometimes fall flat, at 93 minutes, there are enough crazy plot twists and likeable performers to ensure the movie remains mildly amusing throughout. It is even sporadically elevated to a point where it contains genuine laughs, which mostly occur when the archetypal bully, Randy (Jonathan Keltz), and his two sycophantic cohorts appear onscreen. The level of self-parodic aggression they exude is taken to increasingly outrageous levels each time they turn up, and the manic energy and witty one-liners provided by this terrible trio undoubtedly represents the movie’s high point.

However, such comic peaks are all too rare, meaning 21 and Over is a workmanlike, but ultimately unremarkable effort, unlikely to be enjoyed by anyone who actually is over 21.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Not very well, in some cases. Here are our favourite Simpsons holiday reactions, from the countries they visited.

1: ‘We’re Schmidt, and we know we are…’

The worst kept secret was finally revealed yesterday, as Joe Schmidt was announced as the next Irish manager. The affable New Zealander will stay in the job until 2016, and will likely bring a more attack focused, sharper edge to Ireland’s play. The baptism of fire of an Autumn International window including visits from Samoa, Australia and the All Blacks will be relished. The IRFU finally got their man. Leinster, meanwhile, look set to announce Aussie Matt O’Connor as Schmidt’s replacement later in the week, perhaps another astute appointment.

2: Leinster really want to win the Amlin

A blue sky day in Dublin 4, and another champagne performance from the big fish in a small pond. From the intensity of Leinster’s warm-up through to the fist pumping celebration from Johnny Sexton after his try, there was no lack of desire from the home team towards this undoubtedly second tier comp. Jamie Heaslip, nominated for the ERC Player of the Year, put in his best performance of the season, illustrating how effective he still is when let off the shackles. With two work horses beside him in the back row, the Naas man took up the carrying dearth left by a Sean O’Brien sized hole with aplomb. Leinster now face into a possible 5 game home run in the fight for two trophies.

3: Munster’s fight was nearly enough

With their eastern neighbours prancing around in the Dublin sun, Munster were locking horns with an altogether different French beast in Montpellier. Clermont started with their usual thundering power, but another incredibly spirited Munster performance shocked them to the core. 5 more minutes and the result could have been very different, and despite being the second best team, Munster almost pulled off what would surely have been their greatest victory. Rumours abound that Ronan O’Gara is set to retire, which would represent a blow to Rob Penney, but things look a lot rosier than they did just three short weeks ago.

4: The future is bright

A forward-thinking new manager is only as good as the players he has coming through. Leinster and Munster’s A teams proved on Friday evening that the production lines in both provinces show no signs of stopping. Leinster won out on the night, and will compete in the B&I Cup Final against Newcastle next month, while players like Noel Reid, Luke McGrath, Conor Gilsenan and JJ Hanrahan all impressed it seems.

5: One more year?

The great man afforded a wry smile as the R.D.S. crowd made their voices heard over any possible retirement.

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The curtain falls on the Rabo normal season this Friday, while the Lions 2013 debate will surely throw up some corkers.

The show originally aired on NBC with a short, seven-episode season and was quickly renewed. Before the second season even aired, NBC decided they wanted nothing more to do with it and for a time it seemed like Southland had been unfairly and prematurely terminated. Luckily, TNT stepped in and scooped it up and since then has acted has a stable and supportive caretaker.

What sets Southland apart in a very crowded genre is in its uncompromising ability to immerse the viewer. It uses an almost handheld camera style of shooting, stripping away any sense of sophisticated cinematography in order create a sense of closeness and intimacy. It’s both a very simple and complicated approach but one that allows the show a totally unique visual identity and gives the viewer a feeling of very real placement within each scene that is incredibly powerful.

Of course these production elements aren’t the only factor in Southland’s dramatic prowess. Throughout the course of each episode, we’re given insight into the daily lives of a core cast of beat cops and detectives, and the horrible situations they’re forced to deal with all too often. Southland doesn’t try to glamorise law enforcement; rather, it paints a brutally honest picture, showing the long-term, personal effects an intense job can have on the psyche of an individual. It is completely unflinching in its portrayal, unafraid to explore any area of human depravity. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise NBC decided to abandon the show so quickly; clearly they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. And really, it worked out for the better; likely it would have been hamstrung by American television restrictions had it remained a network show.

Officer John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz)

Southland very cleverly blends the standalone procedural with the best aspects of serialised drama. Each episode is usually a series of vignettes, sometimes with no obvious connective tissue. In this context alone they work terrifically. Generally though, there is a thematic thread running through each of them and the links are there if the viewer is willing to dig a little deeper. This structure remained in place and very much effective for the fifth season.

Early on in the show’s lifespan, rookie officer Ben Sherman was positioned as its main character but over the years, the emphasis on him has lessened, and a more even, ensemble approach opted for. Sherman still had his fair share of screen time this year, with a fairly compelling arc once again showcasing his considerable flaws. It certainly wasn’t the highlight of the season but it was engaging enough viewing, even if it seemed to be retreading familiar ground. His partner Sammy Bryant struggled to keep custody of his young child in a similarly enjoyable plot; it was however, often undercut by his ex-wife being one of the most infuriating characters in television history, reaching the point where her mere presence on screen was enough to ruin a scene. Thankfully she recurred less and less as the season went on.

Detective Lydia Adams, in an interesting contrast to Bryant, struggled with her position as a mother but not in the way usually presented. She struggled not only with how to be a mother to her son but more crucially, whether she even wanted to continue being one. It’s a nice twist on a tired formula and an interesting commentary on whether or not everyone is supposed to be a parent. The way in which a lot of her cases inevitably tied into her own motherhood issues did end being a little overused but definitely not to extent that it damaged her development too badly. Lydia’s partner Robinson, introduced last season, continued to be the secret best character on the show.

Without a doubt, veteran cop John Cooper’s multi-episode struggle to prevent his retired past colleague, played by the ever awesome Gerald McRainey, from self-destructing was the best handled character arc. Hicks represented a possible future version of Cooper himself, the committed yet shattered officer ultimately left to wallow in self pity and die a lonely, unceremonious death. It was a bleak and deeply affecting plot line, fantastically well acted. Cooper’s relationship with his new patrol pairing Hank Luceo acted as a catalyst for many of the season’s best moments. While their interactions didn’t exceed last year’s perfect guest casting of Lucy Liu, the strain between the two made for fascinating viewing, especially in relation to a late season episode which surely ranks as one of the most terrifying and shocking in all of television; and that’s saying something considering some of the supremely disturbing material Southland has dealt with in the past.

Five years on, Southland remains as brutally hard hitting and fresh as it was when it first débuted. Very few other long-running dramas can brag of a similar achievement. There’s still plenty left to explore here and it would be a terrible shame were it not given the opportunity to finish on its own terms, its future currently uncertain. As of now though, Southland celebrates its five year anniversary with yet another fantastic season of television, solidifying its position once more as one of the all time great police dramas.

Here are the six most frightening moments in classic kids’ cinema, all of which put fire in our bellies and took years off our lives.

6. The Last Unicorn – The Red Bull

The Last Unicorn may look like a pleasant, girly tale about magical horses, but it was actually more concerned with themes of mortality and regret, and more importantly, frightening the conkers out of every child whose parents were taken in by its cutesy VHS cover. The last unicorn is so named because she’s all alone in the world, thanks to King Haggard (Christopher Lee) who can only achieve happiness by trapping ethereal beings at the ends of the earth, the evil bastard. He controls the monstrous red bull, who attempts to drive the last unicorn into the sea like he did all of her brethren. The bull fails here only due to incompetent wizard Schmendrick’s turning the unicorn into a mortal girl at the last minute, and if you were a little older when first subjected to The Last Unicorn, you’ll probably have found the unicorn’s gradual loss of her memories and reluctance to engage with her true nature even more disturbing than the vicious bovine bully that nearly offs her, twice.

Click here to view the embedded video.

5. Watership Down – DEEEEEEAAAATH!

Bunnies! Lots and lots of bunnies going on an adventure! An adventure that takes them headfirst into danger of the deadliest kind, and we don’t mean that in a Toy Story 3 oh-God-Woody-might-die kind of way; we mean that in a rabbits-are-getting-killed-left-right-and-centre kind of way. If the Watership Down bunnies – Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig and the gang – aren’t getting attacked by predators, gassed out of their warrens, or choked by wire snares, then they’re being tricked by their own kind or browbeaten by the terrifying General Woundwort. Either way, they know at the end of their brief time on the mortal coil, the Black Rabbit is coming for them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

4. All Dogs Go To Heaven – Charlie goes to hell

Everyone loves puppies, so the hypothesis that all dogs go to Heaven should not be a difficult one for any of us to adopt. Of course all dogs go to Heaven. They’re noble and loving and funny and brave and furry. All dogs go to Heaven, except, as is in the case of All Dogs Go To Heaven, they go instead to Hell. Which is fucking terrifying. All Dogs Go To Heaven is essentially The Exorcist for children, conceived and produced purely because bellowing ‘Repent! Repent! For the day of judgement is nigh!’ through the windows of a Montessori is frowned upon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

3. The Neverending Story –Gmork

The Neverending Story tells the heartwarming tale of a grieving child who finds solace in a magical book depicting the fucking apocalypse. Bastian hides from bullies in an inexplicably eerie and very badly insulated school attic, where he reads about the adventures of Atreyu, whose quest to save his world from an all-consuming vacuum involves drowning horses, dying little girls, and a few hundred metric tons of crushing despair. The Oracle, which Atreyu seeks out for guidance, tries to fry him. The notion that his whole world exists only at the whim of an increasingly cynical human world is depressing. And Gmork, the disconcertingly verbose servant of the Nothing, comes along just in time to poison the audience’s once and future dreams with his hairy, toothy, glassy-eyed malevolence.

Click here to view the embedded video.

2. Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory – The tunnel

Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory is full of quietly awful moments: funny when you’re watching it, but not exactly solid in the face of any scrutiny. Who invites a handful of smallies into his factory only to pick them off one by one in some sort of pompous morality test, anyway? What kind of God complex must a crushed velvet weirdo have to torture faintly naughty children with nary a twinge of regret? But in general, this 1971 classic is oodles of primary-colored fun, perforated by a trip through a chocolate river tunnel on a festive boat… which somehow descends into a drug-skewed vision of hell that comes halfway between Jacob’s Ladder and the dead baby scene in Trainspotting. If anyone has an actual fuck what was going on in Mel Stuart’s mind when he put this together, promise us never to write it down or broadcast it in any way, lest its malice escape and kill us all.

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. Return To Oz – The mental hospital, Princess Mombi, the Wheelers… look, basically everything

Return To Oz is all about Dorothy’s return to Oz. Good, clean fun, right? We all know the story of what happened to Dorothy when she first landed in Oz, and apart from a nasty interlude with a green woman at Stage 2 of the Kübler-Ross model, it was fairly manageable for even the tiniest cinephiles. Return To Oz, on the other hand, starts off with Dorothy being admitted to an asylum because she won’t stop harping on about magical lands. Rescued by a mysterious girl who warns Dorothy about the failed patients hidden away in the asylum’s basement, Dorothy ends up back in a very bruised and broken Oz, where she’s set upon by screeching men on wheels before being pursued by a headless witch while her spare faces roar at her from locked cabinets. It’s DELIGHTFUL. And by delightful, we mean it irrevocably loosened the sphincters of everyone who saw it. Grotesque, beautiful horror like this is just wonderful when you’re a grown-up jaded by the wickedness of real life, but Return To Oz is not a show for kids… and we find it hard to believe those reared on Shrek, Hannah Montana and Dora The Explorer would have ever seen anything quite like it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, you’ve played through [insert JRPG here] and realised that you can actually make money out of a pretty map, an annoying string of random encounters and a main character who mostly says ‘…’, and you figure you could do just as well. Good show; having guts is an important part of creating something. There’s way more to producing a game than that, of course. Thankfully, when one gets right down to it, most of it is optional. I mean sure, pre-rendered cut-scenes can look fabulous, but the story they convey is told just as easily (and a damn sight less expensively) with words on a screen. Workarounds abound; rather than spend the GDP of a small country on music, sounds and artwork, you can find loads of high quality stuff on Creative Commons where the only cost is usually crediting the creator.

Story

The most obvious question you should ask yourself first is ‘What’s my game going to be about?’. As you may have guessed from the clue in the genre name, RPGs are about playing a role in a story, and in order to create an RPG you need a story. This is actually the hardest part of the whole thing. A story carries most of the weight of an RPG. It needs to be well-paced to keep a player’s interest, and original enough so that people don’t already know how it turns out (and so nobody sues you for stealing their story). There’s usually a protagonist who travels through the story, overcoming evils and challenges. They need special attention. Who are they? Young girl/boy whose idyllic childhood is shattered by some evil gribbly? Jaded ex-soldier tormented by their past? Wise-cracking demon-hunting jackass with a big sword, red coat and no shirt? What are they battling against? Why them, and not the police/militia/king? What makes them special?

The game world, in all its 25×25 tile glory. More ambitious games will have much, MUCH bigger maps.

It’s perfectly ok if you don’t nail every aspect of the story beforehand. I’d encourage it actually, as better ideas can come along and cause you to re-write sections, so a little vagueness means less work fitting things in. This isn’t a writing course, so I’m not going to go into detail about story structure, pacing, dialogue, world-building or any of that. You can figure it out yourself, or find someone who knows, and use them as a sounding board. The important thing is that after all this scribbling and crossing out and re-writing and getting sighed dreamily at in cafés by girls who don’t realise you’re only making a game, you have something like a plot, and somewhere for it to happen in.

For Project Ramp, I’m ignoring most of the above advice and sticking to nice, straightforward clichés. The general story goes something like this:

World

The world is going to be similarly unimpressive, being more or less a small circular island with a half-dozen locations. A frozen North, a Fiery South, A Forest-filled West and an Oceanic East, with a small town in each for plot to happen in. The idea is for the player to go to each town, collect a new party member and a piece of the original weapon that defeated Seamie in the past, and once they have all four, go to Seamie’s tower and defeat him.

To start off, I created the world, imaginatively entitled ‘World’. I began with a background of ocean, and drew a circle of land in the middle. I coloured in the cardinal directions with different land tiles, and added appropriate looking hills, trees and mountains both for look and to limit player movement (It’s worth noting that you can set whether a tile can be travelled through or not in the database menu). Second, I drew up a little town area where the player will start off. A very simple affair, a house and a pub, as our hero clearly lives the dream. When creating a new map, you get to decide which tileset it will use. ‘World’ uses the field tileset, while ‘Townsville’ uses exterior. There are plenty more bundled with the package or available online.

Events

Our humble town of Townsville. It has a duckpond, pub and some basic event scripts.

You’ll notice a little dwarf ghost standing in the crossroads of the town- that’s the player starting position in the game. It’s an event: a special condition attached to a map tile. Switching to Event Mode puts a grid on the map and lets you select tiles to attach events, such as starting position. By right-clicking a tile you bring up a menu for assigning events. A useful event to get the hang of is the transfer, which immediately teleports the player from the triggered tile to anywhere you want. This is what we use for entering towns or buildings. Right click on the town in the world map, select Quick event/Transfer… and you’ll be able to choose the town map, where it’s a good idea to have the player appear somewhere near the town gate. You can do the reverse for leaving the town.

NOTE: make sure the event for leaving the town is positioned so that the player won’t accidentally trip it after just arriving or wandering about!

The transfer event laid bare! Simple text commands + trigger options = massive flexibility.

You might have noticed that if you have your player exiting the town to appear on the town in the world map, he’ll just trigger the event that transfers him into town again. Most awkward, but easily solved: double click on the event in the world map to bring up the script editor. There you can see the code for the transfer event, and a host of other options you might tweak sometime. For now, all you need to do is head to the trigger option at the bottom, and select ‘action button’. This means that even if our player is standing on the event, they won’t trigger it unless they push the use key. Sorted!

There are many other options available for event triggering, such as the presence/absence of certain party members, the possession of specific items, or the altering of some variable by the event itself or another event entirely. This forms the basis of accepting and completing quests and a whole lot more, which I’ll talk about a little more in another installment.

Since we’re only starting out, that’s enough for today. Here endeth the lesson. You should now be able to create a bunch of maps and set up transfer events to allow a player to move from one to another. Next time, I’ll talk about adding people, conversations and quests.

Stamp It Down!

Pocketwatch’s top-down co-op crime caper started life in 2010 as a prototype called Monte Carlo, and netted creator Andy Schatz the grand prize at that year’s Independent Games Festival. Since then it’s evolved into a more complex beast and, thanks to that original strong showing and an enthusiastically received beta, built a sizeable wave of expectation behind it. But after all that, is it any cop? Yes. And no. But mostly yes.

Unlike the streamlined, frictionless experiences of big-budget mainstreamers, this is a game you’ll have to work to get into — not that it’s needlessly complex, but it’ll take a while to get into the right mindset, to figure out how you’re supposed to approach the game. That’s why that qualification above about the stealth aspect is important: Monaco is a game about heists, of the classic Hollywood devious-dames-and-plinky-piano kind, and as much as heists like that are about meticulous planning and crafty execution, they’re also about hilarious screw-ups and snowballing panic. Things will go wrong, basically, and when that happens you’ll have to mentally gear-shift from softly-softly recon to mad dashes to to find a handy hiding spot to shake your pursuers. Or shoot your way out, depending on your inclination.

Somewhat unexpectedly, there’s a valid comparison to be made to IO Interactive’s Hitman games, in that individual missions are little clockwork puzzles of patrols and tools and routes and switches that need to be mapped out and memorised before you can really make a properly efficient run at them. Like in Hitman, this learning process can be slow and sometimes frustrating, more work than play, but it’s ultimately rewarding, and the systems of the game are loose enough that it’s never just a matter of memorising the ‘correct’ route — there’s generally room for a bit of improvisation, with even a seeming screw-up often lending itself to opportunistic grabbing of some out-of-the-way loot. Monaco strives to reward thinking ahead as much as it rewards thinking on your feet, and it succeeds more often than not.

The game, with its choice of variably-skilled characters (the Locksmith, the Hacker, the scenery-smashing Mole, among others) is clearly built from the ground up with co-op play in mind, and while it can be played single-player, it tends to be a more limiting experience. The recon and basic pilfering elements still work, but it can feel a bit rote — it never really lights up, and the chaos that can break out from an ill-planned approach feels a bit flat when you’ve no-one to share it with. Worse, you’ll encounter situations, especially in later levels, that simply can’t be solved in any kind of elegant or daring way. You’ll just have to pile in, take some damage and wade out, and hopefully not get cornered.

In co-op play, by contrast, brute force rarely comes into it. Depending on the size of your team (up to four, local or online) and the characters you’ve chosen, there will always be a way to combine your skills to pull off a score in some satisfying way; the Hacker shuts down the trip-lasers, for instance, allowing the disguise-wearing Gentleman to saunter in past security, or the Cleaner takes out a guard so that the Locksmith can run in and crack a safe while the camera’s looking the other way. At the very least, one of you can take the heat and lead a chase while the rest take advantage of suddenly unguarded goods. Again, the systems are loose enough that there’s never a truly right answer, and there’s enough scope for mischief and hilarity that the game feels fresh even on repeated plays.

Design-wise there are some great touches, most significantly the way the game area doubles as an automap. At the start the level is hidden, but once you’ve had line of sight on a particular area, it stays mapped — while you’re not in an area, you can still see its layout, entrances and exits, and any useful items like computers or breaker switches. It can look a bit confusing in screenshots but works perfectly in play, and it’s always great to see a neat visual touch that also functions as a solid gameplay element.

Overall, Monaco is a clever, fun experience with a wonderful sense of character. It’s often merely ok in single-player, but comes into its own as a party game, and if you can muster a reliable group of friends to play with you’ll have a blast. All the more so if you can play in the same room — this is a game that’s perfectly suited to sitting around with a bunch of friends, watching the plans play out and the chaos unfold. It’s not perfect, but it’s fresh and it’s new, and given the chance it may just steal your heart.

Steve Coogan excels as Paul Raymond – a real estate developer and entrepreneur who gained infamy when he opened London’s first-ever nightclub in 1958. This true story depicts the increasing success of his business ventures, as he lives a hedonism-fueled existence dominated by beautiful women, lavish houses and Class A drugs. Inevitably, these rather selfish pursuits impact gravely on his family life. The Look of Love therefore revolves around his relationship, or lack thereof, with his loved ones.

There is a stark tragedy in the manner in which he facilitates his own daughter’s drug usage, or in how he callously acts amid the breakup of his marriage, as he leaves his wife for a younger, more vivacious woman. Worst of all is the scene where, later in life, he meets up with his estranged son. The lack of drama during this moment makes it all the more cringeworthy. The son all too meekly thanks him for his hospitality in sharing a bottle of wine with him, before Coogan’s character coldly remarks that the experience was “worthwhile,” as the young man leaves.

As with most Michael Winterbottom films, the personal and political are closely intertwined. It gives us a cogent snapshot of society’s developing attitudes to sex, from the relatively innocuous-seeming nude stage shows of the late 50s and early 60s, to the disconcertingly sordid style epitomised by the unsavoury photoshoots in the Raymond-published ‘Men Only’ magazine. In particular, the cinematography and set design are faultless in consummately evoking even the most minor details of these bygone eras.

Yet while it clearly has the touch of a master craftsman such as Winterbottom, it still seems that a key ingredient is missing, which could have turned a good movie into a great one. While the film toys with the idea of granting Raymond some form of redemption, the suspicion remains that he is a nasty piece of work, obsessed with satisfying his own needs at the expense of others. And though Winterbottom adopted a similar approach with 24-Hour Party People and the similarly unappealing Tony Wilson character, The Look of Love lacks the cultural resonance of that work – Wilson helped inspire countless great rock bands, whereas Raymond’s legacy appears to revolve primarily around scantily clad women and sexist, outdated attitudes.

Consequently, when he does eventually and somewhat predictably begin to suffer ill fortune, the audience will likely struggle to feel much sympathy for him. Of course, you don’t feel too much sympathy for Travis Bickle at the end of Taxi Driver either – but in that case, the unique style and bravura filmmaking more than make up for its protagonist’s unseemly traits. The Look of Love, on the other hand, is not at the same level, and therefore does not earn the right for its main character to seem so inhumane.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While queuing for coffee in Sydney a few days ago, Johnston was wearing a BioShock Infinite t-shirt. To the uninitiated, BioShock Infinite is one of the biggest video game releases of the moment, a franchise sequel and massive console-gaming cornerstone that is expected to shift eight million copies by the end of the year.

This steampunk first-person-shooter, with a serpentine plot that ties together revisionist strands of history, religion, class structures and American exceptionalism, has struck a cord with gamers and the media worldwide; it’s the kind of game that even if you’re not a gamer, you can’t have missed the unavoidable publicity campaign airing on every screen in your possession.

Its gameplay and graphics have been instrumental in its success, but particularly its BioShock’s twisting narrative that has proven the ever-hushed talking point. So tightly kept is the secret of the game’s ending that any discussion of it comes with the strictest of spoiler alerts, or the onslaught of rage and flaming indignation in a webpage’s comment section.

Back in the café, a man was glaring at Johnston, his brow furrowing at her t-shirt. It wasn’t long before he approached her to spitefully declare, ‘You probably haven’t even played it.’

Johnston’s reaction was cool-headed and caustic. She looked her accuser square in the eyes and told him exactly how the game ends, divulging the plot’s big reveal and leaving him totally bewildered. Picking up her coffee, walking out the door, Johnston tweeted her encounter into the stuff of girl gamer legend. Cappuccinos and comebacks have never tasted so sweet.

It’s hard out there for the girl gamers; a minority in a subculture stereotypically dominated by an active group of angry males with a sense of entitlement matched only by their social insularity, the past few years have seen a troubling facet of gaming culture come to the forefront. Harassment of female gamers in the online community, along with the casual use of ‘rape’ as synonym for defeat, has become ingrained as acceptable behaviour simply because it is part of the gaming identity.

While, of course, the numbers who resort to such uncomfortable practices is relatively small in the grand scheme of things, it is the ability of those male gamers to mobilise in their offensive quest to defend their orthodoxy that is truly alarming. We need only look at the case of Anita Sarkeesian, a California-based blogger whose web-series, Feminist Frequency, and personal information was the subject of a vicious online campaign last year.

Sarkeesian blogs about the roles women and female issues have traditionally played in popular culture, and took to KickStarter to crowdsource the funding for a series of shows dedicated to female characters in video games. Almost every avenue was exploited in a campaign of harassment against her: attempts were made to hack her social media accounts, she was sent emails with photo-shopped images of herself being sexually assaulted by male video game characters, even an online game, Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, was created in which users punched an image of the blogger until the screen turned red.

In the end, the torrid abuse was more than matched by financial support from people outraged by the reaction of those gamers. While she set out to raise $6000, by the end of the campaign, Sarkeesian had sourced almost $160,000, and the first video in the series, Damsels in Distress, was released recently.

While Sarkeesian is perhaps an obvious target for disgruntled male gamers, not even 3 year-old girls can escape their ire. Earlier this month, it was reported that Mike Mika, a game designer, had hacked the classic 1983 game Donkey Kong and patched the code so that his daughter could play as the female character, Pauline, rather than as Jump Man, a proto-incarnation of Super Mario. The YouTube video went viral as people around the world applauded Mika for fulfilling his daughter’s desire that Pauline take the lead and do the rescuing.

Then the smack-talking comments rolled in:

‘Cute, but you daughter is going to grow up to be a vapid c—, spewing nonsense about gender equality.’

‘Is this the request section??? ‘cause I’d like a Duck Hunt hack where all the ducks are changed to feminists…’

‘All girls are dumb sluts that want control. Nothing more. They could care less about ‘equality.’’

When that man walked up to Rae Johnston, he didn’t scream at her, he didn’t harass her with messages of hate and sexual assault. In plain view, he didn’t hurl slut-shaming slurs, the kinds which Sarkeesian gets on a daily basis.

But make no mistake, the disdain with which he casually accused her of having never played the game is indicative of the latent and active fears among a group of male gamers who are increasingly afraid of the evolving nature of the gaming community. His accusation was an insult, designed to undermine Johnston as a woman and as a gamer.

And with one sentence, she finished him.

Colin Farrell stars as mob henchman Victor, a quiet yet very effective bit of muscle for oily boss Alphonse Hoyt (an oily Terrence Howard). Seemingly loyal and subservient, Victor in fact has more insidious motives in hanging around with the New York gang. He also develops a relationship with neighbour Beatrice, a shy and awkward French girl who has been the victim in a brutal drunk driving accident and who also has a revenge vendetta on in her plans.

With promotional material playing heavy on the reunion of Noomi Rapace and her Girl With The Dragon Tattoo director Niels Arden Oplev, Dead Man Down gives the impression that it might transport some of the clever Nordic thriller’s beats across the Atlantic, yet doesn’t even come close. Its opening — and certainly its trailer — suggests a fun, pulpy actioner, yet pulls back until its final act. What’s left is a plot-heavy bore that’s nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is. Exposition is established and quickly forgotten, plot twists are hilarious: photographic jigsaw pieces are sent; a major reveal involves the discovery of a clandestine room with a cork board that’d make even Carrie Mathison blush.

The New York City it takes place is also unlike anything you may have ever seen: children abuse pretty twee French girls with who’ve been in a car accident, convicted drunk drivers are back on the road within a fortnight, no one bats an eyelid at people covered in blood shifting on the subway and Albanian gangsters still roam the streets. I mean, come on. We’re pretty sure Liam Neeson got them all.

With so many good turns in characters roles in recent memory, Colin Farrell again shows that he’s either not cut out for action movies or just really bad at picking them. Victor’s chemisty with Beatrice — a woman with terrible taste for torn jeans, crop tops and apparently a beautician who can’t hide minimal scarring — would be the most cringe-inducing element of the movie were it not for Farrell’s Hungarian accent. It’s not just the two leads who suffer; every single one of the cast suffer, whether they’re a revered French actress, an Oscar winner, a wrestler in his debut role or Dominic Cooper as Williamsburg’s first hipster-gangster.

With little on show in terms of plot, performance and exceptionally flat direction from Arden Oplev, it was a catastrophe at the US box office and looks set to repeat in Europe as it’s pitted against Iron Man 3 in the most unfair fight since the Burmese military went up against John Rambo. And at just under two hours, Dead Man Down makes the most cardinal of sins for a bad movie: it doesn’t even have the decency to be over and done with quickly.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And already we’re cheating because this isn’t an Iron Man story, it’s about The Mandarin. But hey, he’s in the movie too, right? The Mandarin captures a famous film director and hold his wife hostage until he makes a great movie about The Mandarin’s life. This story is a fantastic insight into the mind of a tyrant. The contradictory scripts he comes up with show us how he sees himself and how he sees his arch nemesis, Tony Stark.

The armoured avenger clashes with the armoured despot in the armoured aged of Camelot. Dr. Doom and Iron Man wind up in the ‘past’ where they respectively team up with the opposing forces of Morgan Le Fey and King Arthur before banding together to return home. Old school comic book fun.

The most annoying thing about reading Iron Man? Armour is always spelled the American way wrong. Anyway, this nifty story can almost be seen as a  closing chapter in a dark trilogy of Iron Man stories that includes Iron Monger and Demon In a Bottle (below). It’s arguably the most influential Iron Man story because it asks an obvious question central to Iron Man‘s technological theme – what if the technology falls into the wrong hands? As such, this story gets re-told in various ways every so often. Its fingerprints can be seen on the script to Iron Man 2 and the recent Matt Fraction story, ‘Five Nightmares’, if you’re looking for something more modern.

This is the one everyone has at least heard of but its not necessarily the best Iron Man story. It’s a great one, sure, but the alcoholism is a tragic consequence of the meat of this story which is the uphill battle Tony is set on by his rivalry with Justin Hammer. Demon in a Bottle had a ‘Dark Knight Effect’ though, in that the alcoholism became a defining aspect of Iron Man for years, as opposed to his being a genius inventor.

After hitting rock bottom and literally having to reboot his own body, Tony sets about building himself and his company from the ground up. However, eager to keep him down is the new leader of Hammer Industries, Justine Hammer and her own mechanised soldier, Detroit Steel. This story employs a nifty use of peer-to-peer technology and gaming apps in a super-villain application of real world technology we all use.

There is no better place for a neophyte Iron Man reader to start off with than Extremis. This was the beginning of Marvel’s new vision for Tony Stark and was kicked off in high gear with tech-savy, science buff writer, Warren Ellis. It updates Iron Man’s origins as well as his armour and lays the ground work that today’s Iron Man writers are still working from.

For our money, the best modern Iron Man vs. Mandarin story available. After Extremis, the baton was handed to writers Daniel and Charles Knauf (of HBO’s Carnivale fame) and Haunted is the culmination of their time on the book, dealing with Tony’s tenure as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. as well as the Extremis storyline.

After the events of the Marvel superhero Civil War, Iron Man was appointed to Nick Fury’s old job as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. The book sported a terrific new supporting cast during this time and a new espionage flavour, while Tony employed his corporate sensibilities to running the world’s foremost security force.

The story that divided fans in their love/hate for Iron Man. Iron Man came down on the pro side of a Superhuman Registration Act in opposition to Captain America. While not strictly an Iron Man story, Tony and Captain America were the figureheads of the battle. Right or wrong, Civil War cemented Iron Man’s new A-list status is the eyes of the fans. Whose side are you on? (We here at Ramp thought Iron Man Captain America was totally in the right. Of course superheroes should be registered. Viva la Revolution!)

The behind the scenes look at the toll Iron Man’s pro-SRA stance takes on Tony Stark, the people around him and the people he has drafted to his cause. These two stories can be read in tandem with, or exclusive to, one another but this is the one that casts Iron Man in a more sympathetic light. The main Civil War book paints him as a bit of a dick.

Iron Man knows things. Tony Stark has information that the powers-that-be want and shouldn’t get their hands on. So he sets about deleting his own mind while on the run from the government. Will he be caught before his mind is gone? And can there be any coming back from destroying yourself? This is one of the most tense Iron Man stories ever written, again neatly working from the foundation that Extremis had laid several years before and using our understanding of contemporary technology to tell a thrilling superhero espionage story.

If you’re thinking of signing up/have signed up for a race this summer, now is the time to get out there and start training in earnest. Here are some tips to inspire you:

When setting out a training diary, do NOT be overambitious. It can be very tempting to pencil in the maximum amount of sessions when you’re feeling energetic, but it’s important to be realistic. Missing a workout will make you feel grouchy and guilty. Aim to get out about 3 times a week, and if you get the chance to throw in a bonus run, you’ll feel even more smug!

Plan ahead using your phone calendar/diary. Work backwards from the date of your run – if it’s the mini marathon, and you’re working up to running 10km for the first time, think of the time rather than distance. It’s important to have the endurance to keep going so plan one “long run” a week, with two shorter runs of about 20-40 minutes. For 10km, you might aim to complete the race in about an hour. So plan to be running for over an hour for your last long run before the event. Work backwards from that, taking ten minutes off each long run as you go. With 6 weeks to go, you could start with 30 minutes and work up to 80 minutes.

 Make sure you eat properly on your ‘long run’ days. A favourite energy-rich snack (which also happens to be very tasty) is a wholemeal bagel with peanut butter and a banana on top. Eat this (or whatever works for you) a few hours before your long run.

Drink plenty of water before your run. If you feel you need it, you could bring your water with you on the run. If you’d find that a distraction, just make sure to drink about 500ml of water 45 minutes or so before your run. Of course, it goes without saying that  you should drink plenty of water after your run as well.

 Track your progress – pick up a free running app, like the Nike+ app or Map My Run. These will help you track your pace, and also give you a nice tool for looking back on your achievements at the end of the week. Ideal for boasting smugly to your friends.*

That’s all folks! The only other thing to say is, picturing yourself as Road Runner is a surprisingly effective motivator . Consider it when you’re struggling through the last few minutes/kilometres. Meep meep!

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If you’re looking for a more specific training programme, the internet is full of options. The Flora Women’s Mini Marathon website offers 3 different training schedules based on your fitness level. These programmes are over a much longer period of time, but you can adapt them to suit you. Run Ireland.com has an even shorter and more intense option here.

No exercise-related article would be complete without a little Rocky, so watch the master if you’re still not quite sure about this training lark:

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Best of luck to anyone running this season – see you out there!

*This is not advisable and will probably lead to a lot of slagging.

Then there’s the kind of challenge that goes so far off the disgrace scale that its measurement may as well be on Alpha Centauri. It comes full circle and lands somewhere in the vicinity of outright hilarity. Allow us to furnish you with a few examples.

11 Luis Suarez on Otman Bakkal

Let’s get the elephant out of the room, shall we? In his Ajax days, Luis Suarez still had a habit of losing the run of himself from time to time. In one such heated exchange, he ended up biting PSV’s Otman Bakkal on the chest. The infringement was so off-kilter, no one was quite sure how to react. Suarez got a lengthy ban for his troubles and never bit anyone again.

10. Zinedine Zidane on Marco Materazzi

The only reason this is so low is because you’ve seen it before. Even Family Guy has parodied it. Zidane’s perfectly-fashioned headbutt on Materazzi’s sternum tarnished the last appearance of one of the world’s greatest footballers, but it’s impossible not to think it’s funny considering just how much of a jerk Materazzi is.

9. Matt Messias on Robbie Savage

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There are two types of people in the world: those who dislike Robbie Savage, and those who really dislike Robbie Savage. The Leicester City journeyman realised that referee Matt Messias fell into the latter camp during a game when the official swung out an arm and clobbered the long-haired midfielder straight in the craw. Admittedly, Messias didn’t see Savage approaching, due to the lack of eyes in the back of his head, but everyone enjoyed it, because there are two types of people in the world…

8. Bryan Carrasco on Bryan Carrasco

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South Americans get a bad rep for simulation, but Chile’s Bryan Carrasco possibly takes the biscuit when it comes to silliness. During an U20 match against Ecuador, Carrasco grabbed his marker’s hand and smacked himself in the face with it, calling foul play.

4. Scott Parker on Joe Cole

It’s fitting that such a challenge as British as Scott Parker’s demolition of Joe Cole happened in the land of Isaac Newton, as you’re unlikely to find an image as demonstrative of F = ma in sport in your life. Joe Cole was alright after, if a little inverted.

3. Bobby Zamora on Jordi Gomez

It’s uncertain whether this was a good or bad attempt at killing someone on a football field. Bobby Zamora, large sometime England international, decided that the perennially inoffensive Spanish playmaker for Wigan, Jordi Gormez, was in need of an immediate decapitation. Zamora got his marching orders for trying to apply the headsman’s boot. Even more laughable/reprehensible is that he claimed Gomez was making too much of the challenge. The above challenge. With studs. To the head. Ow.

2. Didier Zokora on Emre Belozoglu

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Likely to have even the non-testicle-owning readers among you squirming, Didier Zokora’s no holds barred assault on Emre’s nether regions seems a bit extreme out of context. However, following a fierce bout of racial abuse from Emre to the former Tottenham midfielder, Zokora took matters into his own feet and delivered a sweet blow of Nike justice right to the gonads – a kick so late it could be mistaken for a Dublin bus. The referee was so sympathetic to Zokora’s cause, he issued Zokora a yellow card (so that he couldn’t face extra punishment) and Emre an ice pack.

1. Francesco Totti on Mario Balotelli

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Picture the scene: You’re Francesco Totti of Roma, one of the finest Italian footballers of your generation. You’re passionate, creative, and have passing and goalscoring skill coming out of your nostrils. It’s injury time in the 2010 Italian Cup final and you’re 1-0 down to bitter rivals Inter Milan. The nerazzurri have possession and this upstart, this freak, this egomaniacal young starlet, Mario Balotelli, is in front of you with the ball. Time is ticking away, and Super Mario is purposely dithering. Showboating. Running down the clock. In front of you, YOU, his not-undersized posterior is sticking out, taunting you with its every wobble. Time, the cup and its glory are draining away. There’s only one thing for it: a right big kick up the arse.

Everything about this is beautiful. The uncanny Ted on Len Brennan similarity. The reaction from Daniele De Rossi. That it was in a cup final watched by millions. That he did it to a guy like Balotelli who’s so far up his own arse, it could well be construed as a kick to the face. That you can pinpoint the precise moment this evil thought flashes through his eyes. That it was so mind-blowingly WTF the Inter players didn’t even bother with the obligatory team unity aggro that usually precipitates this kind of thing, because it was so sublimely executed. As far as kicks up the jacksy go, there’s not one better.

It’s refreshing, therefore, to report that Iron Man 3 not only equals the achievements of previous efforts in the series, but it’s also arguably the best one of all.

Tony Stark is back, played again by the inimitable Robert Downey Jr, and while it isn’t quite as grim as say, The Dark Knight films at their bleakest, Iron Man 3 is certainly the most serious movie of the trilogy. The film picks up where The Avengers left off, with Tony still recovering from the unenviable task of having to save the world. Much like Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight Rises, Stark suffers from defects that are unmistakably human during the first part of the film. He struggles to sleep and so spends most nights tinkering away at his base. He is even prone to panic attacks, or ‘freaking out’ as he puts it, and is perpetually struggling to master the intricacies of his Iron Man suit. Meanwhile, a terrorist group are wreaking havoc on the world, and are led by an evil dictator-type figure known as The Mandarin (played by Ben Kingsley, who is clearly enjoying himself in this scene-stealing role), who has a penchant for filming his murders of innocent Americans, while teasingly asking the country’s president to intervene. Stark also has to worry about Aldrich Killian (Guy Pearce), a suspicious-seeming geneticist with designs on his beloved girlfriend Pepper Potts.

Director and writer Shane Black – who has emerged from relative obscurity, having enjoyed a few years as a Hollywood golden boy after selling the script for Lethal Weapon aged 22 and earning a hefty $4m for writing The Long Kiss Goodnight in 1996, before his career went awry – does a fine job at the helm. He has spoken in interviews of wanting to give the film ‘an edge’, and the conspicuous level of soul-searching that he engages in means Downey has to do more genuine acting here than in the first two Iron Man films combined. And this change also helps breathe fresh air into the series, in comparison to the far lighter first two efforts, as Stark’s problems with self-doubt and human frailties are conveyed impeccably, and thus give the viewer renewed reason to root for him.

Black’s customary wit – most noticeable in his 2005 directorial debut, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang – has also remained intact in this more mainstream effort. The film rivals The Avengers, with its abundance of sharp one-liners, and Downey’s delivery is as amiably deadpan as ever: ‘Occasionally, I save the world’, he remarks wryly at one point. Even the appearance of a child character – who happens to be hyper-intelligent in the way only kids in movies tend to be – adds to the hilarity, as he engages in some priceless banter with Stark, never coming across as irritating in any way.

That said, while the movie has many pleasant surprises, it’s still very much an Iron Man film – Black has tweaked the formula rather than tearing it up and starting again. Thus, it has plenty of all-too-familiar and remarkably noisy action scenes that demand to be watched in an IMAX theatre in order to absorb their full effect. And consequently, there is enough of this manic madness, replete with spectacular explosions and well-choreographed fight sequences, to ensure that long-term fans will go home happy. And while viewing this well-orchestrated chaos may feel far more dispensable than your average Oscar-winning movie, in terms of pure frenetic fun, it’s hard to beat.

But of course, those who were never quite sure what all the fuss was about in the first place may well feel underwhelmed once again, but Black’s wit, coupled with Downey’s effervescence, means even they should find elements to admire in this third outing.

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Facing a sticky trip to the Sportsground, Ulster put their European debacle behind them. Tommy Bowe continued his try-scoring form, becoming the first player to 50 tries in this league, while Nick Williams excelled in getting go forward ball. To their credit, Ulster look likely to finish the league on top of the log, though the unfortunate need to play a possible home final in the RDS will temper this advantage slightly.

Opponents Connacht suffered again from the performance of their stand-offs, with both Parks and Nikora failing to control the game. The arrival of AIL winning Lansdowne 10 Craig Ronaldson will provide some much needed depth in this position for next year and the Kilkenny College man could prove a shrewd capture.

In Italy on Sunday, Leinster put in a slightly Jekyll and Hyde performance against a poor Zebre side. Leading 17-3 after the first quarter, some defensive lapses and excellent attacking from wing Sinoti Sinoti gave the home team some impetus. The quality shone through in the second half however, with Toner, Ryan, O’Driscoll and Nacewa putting in fine performances.

John Cooney showed up well at 9, and may be needed before the season is out, while Sexton got his Lions chances back on track with 7/7 kicks and some nice playmaking.

Joe Schmidt will have more than any impending job offers on his mind this week, with both Madigan and Sexton putting forward strong cases to start against Biarritz.

Munster gave their ‘A’ team a run out in sunny Newport, going down to the Dragons in an action-packed 80 mins, though this won’t have much of an impact on their preparation for the Clermont game.

Elsewhere, surprise package of the Rabo season Glasgow were the big winners of the penultimate round. Welcoming the imposing Ospreys to Scotstoun, Warriors needed a win to keep the pressure on Leinster and Ulster, and they certainly obliged.

Rugby in Glasgow has, quite understandably, been a second citizen after the mighty Old Firm rivalry, but with Rangers stuck in the lower leagues, crowds at the new stadium have dramatically increased, and the team has replied with some top class performances. In Matawalu, Hogg, Strauss and Grant, Glasgow have top quality players in key positions, and will worry their semi final opponents.

A likely win for each of the top 4 in two weeks time will see Ulster v. Scarlets and Leinster v. Warriors in the semis.

The focus for Munster and Leinster turns to European adventures this week, with the Red Army set to converge on Clermont on Saturday. Munster will likely look to make the game scrappy and tight, with the performance of the backrow and snarling defensive aggression the key to upsetting the French side. This is a bigger task than facing down Quins, and is possibly a bridge too far, but again, never say never when Munster are playing.

Brace for an action packed season end and don’t be surprised if Irish rugby enters the ‘Joe Schmidt era’ by the end of the week.

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Us: Nah

Taxi driver: See the match last night?

Us: Nah

Co-worker: See the match last night?

Us: Nah

Barman: See the match last night?

Us: Nah

The more eagle-eyed among you may have spotted a trend. There was a time when we could expertly bluff our way through a conversation about football with a few vague, yet completely irrefutable phrases and observations: ‘He’s not a good reader of the game’, ‘He pulled it together in the second half’ (someone always pulls it together in the second half), ‘It was going that way alright’, ‘Ronaldo, aye, he’s a wanker.’ Nowadays we just can’t be arsed. We’re not monsters, though, here in the Ramp basement, so we’ve found some middle ground where we can all meet and happily chat about the game. It’s a game of two halves after all. This is how it goes…

Football fan: See the match last night?

Us: Nah, but remember when Christy scored that penalty…’

So, get ready to hit Netflix and brush up lads, with our top sixteen football films for non-football fans.

16. Bend It Like Beckham

Triumph over adversity – three words that can strike fear into any film fan. Jess is an Indian girl with mad skillz whose folks are none too impressed with her dreams of becoming a footballer. Kiera Knightley plays her teammate, Jules. Both of them fancy the coach, Joe. Uninteresting things ensue and families and friends row, but in the end Jess wipes Kiera Knightley’s eye (KK’s good with it) and nabs Joe, finds acceptance from her parents and jets off to America to play some soccer.

15. When Saturday Comes

HOLD THE PHONE! It’s a Sean Bean film where Sean Bean doesn’t die. And that’s a lesser Sean Bean film, for Sean Bean must die for a Sean Bean film to be considered a worthy entry in the Sean Bean canon. Sean Bean plays a footb… ah fuck it, who even cares; there’s no noble death here. If anyone wants to film Roy Of The Rovers, though, Sean Bean is our first shout for Roy Race. But Race must die.

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14. Shaolin Soccer

A Shaolin kung fu master attempts to bring the spiritual benefits of his art to the masses via the medium of football, putting together a team of his brothers to play against some other kick-ass jocks.  This is how people picture their own overhead bicycle kicks actually turning out.

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13. Green Street

Before he showed up in Sons Of Anarchy playing the least convincing biker gang member in living memory, whassface turned up in this, playing the least convincing football hooligan ever. Elijah Wood is the naïve Yank who gets dragged into the West Ham firm’s fun, and this is some well-dressed fun it has to be said. Nowhere near as much hilarity as Danny Dyer’s effort below, but a noble effort nonetheless. Come on you GSE!

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12. Mike Bassett: England Manager

When the England manager has a heart attack, Division One manager Mike Bassett is given the title. For the non-football fan, this is the equivalent of the treasurer of the local pigeon fanciers club taking over as Taoiseach of Dublin Zoo. Jim Royle plays Bassett. Profanity ensues.

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11. Mean Machine

Real-life ex-footballer Vinnie Jones is the ‘Mean Machine’ of the title, a former England captain imprisoned for assaulting two policemen. The inevitable follows and we are treated to a grudge match between the prisoners and the guards. Vinnie’s character has a history of match-fixing, so when the guards are getting their arses handed to them the warden attempts to blackmail him into throwing the game. If this seems like a quality piece of filmmaking so far, allow us to interject… Danny Dyer is in it.

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10. The Van

Against the backdrop of the Irish team’s Italia ‘90 World Cup campaign, BFF’s Bimbo and Larry team up to sell fish’n’chips from the chip van Bimbo buys with his redundancy money. In the third of Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy novels to be filmed, Bimbo and Larry’s friendship takes a battering (LOL) before they eventually shrug off their respective shoulder chips and get rid of that fucking van. Footie fans, allow yourselves a moment to reminisce about David O’Leary, Packie, and Après Match. The rest of you, read on.

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9. The Football Factory

Bish bosh me old china, this ridiculous pile of cobblers stars all round geezer Danny Dyer, instantly elevating it to top comedy on the list. Danny plays Tommy, a Chelsea supporting weekend warrior ‘oo loves a good old ruck with his stereotype mates. You don’t need us to tell you it all goes Pete Tong; some Berkeley Hunts get their crusty breads kicked in, others get nicked by the filth, others end up brown bread. This is less rumination on the inner workings of a fraternal organisation, than a Danny Dyer masterclass in Danny Dyer.

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8. Fever Pitch

It’s got your man Mr Darcy from the BBC in it. In that adaptation of Jane Austin’s novel, he loved Elizabeth Bennet. In this adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel, he loves the Arse.

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7. Kes

Kes competes with Escape To Victory (and wins) for the best onscreen game of football ever filmed. Brian Glover plays Mr Sugden, the PE teacher with delusions of Bobby Charlton who relentlessly breaks our hero Billy’s balls. Kes is a sad fuckin’ film, man, when all is said and done. We would gladly trade the lives of ten Sean Beans for one kestrel, but life doesn’t work that way and neither does film. This match is the light relief amongst the gloom – a grown man knocking lumps out of wee lads on the school pitch. We all had one PE teacher like this.

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6. My Left Foot

An all rounder, Christy stopped shots with his head, and scored penos with his foot. They had to keep the shots low you see, the good sheets would have been destroyed.

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5. Trainspotting

Even those who don’t know the first thing about the game know Archie Gemmill, thanks to Irvine Welsh. Trainspotting opens with a five-a-side match that snappily introduces us to the personalities of our main protagonists through their pitch antics. Sick Boy is a sneaky hashin’ bastard. Begbie is a dirty hashin’ bastard and doesn’t care who knows it. Spud is clean useless. Tommy is solid and dependable. Renton is spaced out. Rents later goes round to visit Tommy and borrows his 100 Great Goals video, having surreptitiously swapped the video for a homemade sex tape of Tommy and Lizzy. That former video features the very Gemmill strike that the Rent Boy references after the first shag in ages. ‘Here git tae fuck, Trainspottin’s no aboot fitba ya wee radge’ we hear you protest. Mibbe no, but its goat enough ey they noads tae the game tae git oan oor fuckin’ list ya doss cunt.

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4. The Firm

All the ingredients are here for a cracker – Jim McDonald from Coronation Street is in it so he is, and Mickey Pearce from Only Fools & Horses, and Chalky from Quadrophenia looking all Ace Face-y, and Gary Oldman’s here too. Oldman plays Firm leader Bex (‘Confucius say “man who bottles out gets bottled in”, know wharra mean?’), who wants the rival firms to unite in advance of a forthcoming ruck with some tooled-up Dutch hardnuts. Queue some top-class baiting, sniping and all round acting the maggot as the rival bosses engage in being silly-billies (Chalky’s lads get their jollies by trashing Bex’s crew’s motors and spraying blue paint on their Y-fronts in the changing room while they play football. What’s even more bizarre is that Bex’s team have their undercrackers already laid out. Is that a thing, football guys?). A loose cannon, but a visionary, was top boy Bex. (Note use of past tense. Bollocks to your spoilers, it was 24 years ago you slags)

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3. Looking For Eric

This is the second entry for Ken Loach in our list, and when he’s not killing kestrels he’s focusing his ire on honest working folk. Interspersed with footage of Cantona’s finest moments with Manchester United, the film focuses on the mental breakdown of postman Eric. Eric’s a sound head, his teenage sons are arseholes, his estranged wife is back on the scene, and on top of it all he’s got Eric Cantona spouting philosophy at him. Eric is losing his mind and Cantona’s sitting up in his bedroom drinking the guy’s wine and smoking his gear, being all cool and refined, like the last thing you want to see when you’re in the pits. At one point Cantona waxes lyrical on his own pass to Dennis Irwin against Spurs, ‘like an offering, to the great god of football’, and even if you couldn’t give a shite about Irwin scoring against Spurs, it’s hard not to get swept up in the moment. Then he pulls out a fucking trumpet and starts playing. That’s the way he works though, Cantona, (‘I am not a man. I am Cantona)’, and before long postman Eric has taken back control of his house, his life and his marbles.

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2. ID

Two coppers go undercover to infiltrate the fictional Shadwell F.C. firm to get a handle on the top dogs. Thug life proves addictive, though, and the Old Bill become more Shadwell than the real hooligans. It’s a gritty business this, and ID is the best entry in the football hooliganism oeuvre, bringing us along on the exhilaration of the victories and the inevitable fallout.

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1. Escape To Victory

Not only is Escape To Victory the greatest football film, it’s the greatest war film, the greatest triumph over adversity film, the greatest bromance, the greatest spy film, the greatest ‘up yours Nazis!’ film, and fuck it, we’re calling it… it’s the greatest Stallone film. It’s Stallone at his persistent, charming best. Rocky has raw talent. Rambo knows his beans when it comes to carnage. John Spartan travels through time, kinda. Hatch? Hatch can’t play football to save his life but finagles his way on to the Allied POW’s football team as a trainer. He then engages in some reluctant espionage and becomes instrumental in the half-time escape plan that is to take place during the exhibition match between the prisoners and the Germans. The match officials are the dirtiest bastards ever to don the shorts of officialdom and despite the odds and goals stacked against them, the Allies forego the half-time escape to return to the pitch and outskill the Germans – Ossie Ardiles’ overhead flick, Hatch in goals saving everything (he pulled it together in the second half), Pelé simply being Pelé. If every football match went like this we’d all be watching.

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